Tonight I attended a support group at my daughter’s wrap
around agency where they had a presenter who talked about a method called Rapid
Prompting Method (RPM). The method seems really interesting but it requires the
child to spell out what they are trying to communicate so I am not sure it is
something my daughter at age 5 would be able to do. They start to work with
children at age 4 so there may be a few things that start building on now.
There are a few books available on this subject and I plan on shelling out the
money for them and reading them in the precious little spare time that I have.
During this group and this presentation the topic of how
much is actually going through the minds of our non-verbal kids came up and it
was a reminder to me that I need to really start assuming my daughter is in
there and understanding me. I really need to stop talking about her or treating
her as if she does not have the ability to understand the things that I am
saying. I need to start talking to her instead of at her even if she is not
speaking back to me. This RPM method seems to have a lot of promise and I plan
on researching it more, it is another method of giving your child a way to
express themselves. I am not sure what method or system we will end up using
but I will keep trying to work with Elizabeth to find a way to tell us how we
can meet her needs. I know that she understands language, when I talk to her or
ask her to do something she will listen and sometimes follow instructions so I know
she has the ability to understand language.
My daughter just turned 5 last week and I really need to
work on treating her more like a 5 year old and not babying her. I tend to just
do things for her since it is how I have always done it instead of expecting
her to do it herself. She has the ability to do so much more than I give her
credit for. One of the things that she loves doing is taking all of her clothes
off, she does this constantly but when I go to bathe her at night I still take
off her clothes for her. I am not sure why I do this, I guess it is because I
always have and she has never offered or attempted to do it on her own. Tonight
for bath I asked her to take off her own clothes and she did it just like that.
I really need to start pushing her more; she can do a lot of things that I just
automatically do it for it. I really need to change my habits.
On another note I should probably buy stock in Lucky Charms,
that has been Elizabeth’s food of choice lately. She mostly eats the
marshmallows but every now and then she will eat a few of the cereal pieces as
well. We make her use her spoon to eat it and here and there she gets a few
cereal pieces on her spoon as she is attempting to pick out just the
marshmallows, at this point with her picky eating I call that a win. Several
times a day she takes my hand and leads me over to where the cereal is which her
way of asking to have some.
Christmas time is almost upon us and I have already almost
completed my shopping. My older daughter is hard to buy for because she really
has very little interest in anything toy related anymore. My younger daughter is
the opposite, she has a ton of different interests and the difficult part for
her is narrowing down which toys to get her. For my older daughter I typically
end up buying her a few toys that I hope she will like and a few sensory
things. This year I bought a pair of noise reducing headphones and a sensory
pillow for her, she will probably like these items much more than the toys. I
love Amazon, I can find so many sensory things for her on there. I think that I
probably do 90 percent of my shopping on there, it also helps to have Amazon
Prime with the free two day shipping. I am very thankful for shopping websites
like Amazon, prior to that I would have actually have to physically go to the
mall and shop.
Thanks for reading. Sorry for any errors, I really hate
proofreading.
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