Another Great Story

I don't think I'll be able to top the story that Nicole shared yesterday, but I thought since she shared a nice success story that I would share something that happened this week as well. I have been working with this family for just over a year now and they have begun their third assessment. For different reasons, each assessment has it's own challenge. This particular assessment has given me a challenge because this young man made each objective that I tested out on him seem so effortless. There was no spotlighting or scaffolding that needed to take place to show mastery in these objectives. Usually I'll hit a wall with one or two objectives and I'll know exactly what we'll work on next. Wow! what a great challenge to be faced with!

At the end of this particular component of the assessment I decided to just pull out a game to play with him. It was such a pleasure to spend this time with him. During the game we had a lot of general chit chat about the game, emotion sharing over things that happened and such natural facial gazing to see my reaction or to share his reaction to things that happened. We even came to a point where we didn't know what a particular card was to be used for, so we talked about it and he made a suggestion and then I suggested something else. He quickly responded with "yeah, let's use it that way". This coming from a kid who had to have control over everything when we first started! At the end of the game I ended up winning, he looked up at me, frowned and snapped his fingers with a simple shucks. I loved being able to see a gesture, facial gaze integrated with an expression and words used together to share his simple reaction to losing the game. How cool to see him communicating with such broadband communication. When I started working with this family, if there was a chance he would lose a game, he wouldn't play. The focus of any game was the competition and the goal was to win, now it was about the interaction that we got to share.

I continue to stand amazed by this wonderful program and look forward to sharing more wonderful success stories in the future. Now I'm off to try and figure out an objective to work on with him!

Have a wonderful fall week!
Michelle