A Joyful Noise

Reagan has been home almost 2 years now (just 3 weeks shy) and working hard on her academic, language, and physical skills. Coming from an institution life she was of course not up to the level she should have been so helping her work on those skills has been our main focus. The thing about Reagan is she is so eager to please you and 99% of the time has a smile on her face while doing so. The more you encourage her and shout out words of praise the harder she works. Rewards for her do not have to be some expensive toy or outing. In fact, I often let her pick something out of my purse or let her stay up later than the other kids (she still is in bed by 8:00p.m.). We incorporate therapy into everything she does so it's like she is getting her OT, PT, and speech wrapped up in one bundle all the while doing her school work. At one point she was in speech therapy but that therapist just would not get it through her head that Reagan did not know what a lawn mower or anything else was until you told her. Holding up a card and asking "what is this?" was not the way to teach Reagan and still is not. With her hydrocephalus you need to have a more hands on approach and then transfer that over to paper learning.
 Reagan is now working on writing her name in lower case letters (she already knows how with uppercase), recognizes and writes all her upper case letters and all numbers to 20, knows all colors and shapes, and right now she is working on beginning sounds of things. This seems to be a particularly hard area for her so I am looking into different ways to show her that. When Reagan first came home I gave her a newspaper and scissors to let her practice cutting. She was familiar with scissors because at her old institution that director really cared about the children and they had schooling and activities. Now Reagan can cut on a thin line with 95% accuracy. My main goal here is for her to cut out all of my coupons. Oh yeah!!! Now don't think that is unfair because I look at it as fine motor skill training as well as her PreFinance class. Told you we put learning into everything we do!!

 Brian and I began discussing what activity we would like to see her try as many are not really an option for Reagan yet. I began to think that some music lessons may be a good place to start so today Reagan had her very first piano lesson. I have to admit I was extremely skeptical that she would be able to even be able to understand what she needed to do much less that fact that she would never be able to use the pedals. Well I will tell you that I was pleasantly surprised. Miss Becky is her teacher and is actually a music teacher in the schools and works with children with special needs. Miss Becky was so amazing with Reagan!! She constantly used praise and encouragement for Reagan to try things and explained them in a way Reagan could understand. If anyone lives in this area and wants their child to take piano I would totally recommend Miss Becky at Mansfield Music Mentors. So, without further adieu, here is my Reagan Faith debuting her first song: Twinkle Little Star. 

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