Speech Therapy Update

Jeff and I had Ella's 2nd trimester Parent-Teacher Conference yesterday with Miss Karen and Miss Janet...her teacher and speech therapist. Ella has been attending school since September and recently we changed her schedule to 4 days/week here, and daycare on Friday's. We are all in agreement that Ella seems to love preschool, has adapted well to her schedule, and is showing great progress. One of the major goals has been to get Ella to work on her "m", "p", and "b" sounds...all consonants that involve closing the mouth in order to verbalize. She has shown major success with this and is now saying words like bubbles, Pinkie, play, mine(this is a favorite), boy, purple, etc.

Over the last few weeks she has shown interest in colors and is able to say every color in her color book, although orange she calls "noise". Still pretty good for a 3 year-old. She can also count to 12...verified by Miss Karen. The class has been working on dressing/undressing themselves (with their snowsuits) daily which has triggered Ella's need to prove that she can do this at home. She changes her clothes anywhere from 2 to 20 times on any given evening.

The challenges that we are still facing with Ella's speech is following through with the endings of words like "ing" or "ed" when describing things/actions. She is also having a hard time answering Who, What, and Where questions. And, whenever she is asked to say an animal, instead of using the name, she uses the sound the animal makes in order to describe it. For example, a "Moo" is a cow, a "Meow" is a cat, a "Qua Qua" is a duck...you get the idea.

All in all though, the class has been wonderful for Ella's speech, and it really is a relief to be able to verbally communicate with each other now. Her teachers were quick to state that she is a very smart little girl, and her grasp of concepts is spot on, sometimes even above and beyond, where she should be for her age. Yay!