Well Done TJ!!

TJ is a very…….  complex little man.

He made up his own language as a toddler. Everything in his world could be named or described with about 20 nouns, the most common one being “cup”.

Cup was his word of choice for anything relating to drinking or liquids. For example “cup” was his word for the following things – water, cordial, fizzy drink, coffee, plastic cups, drinking glasses, coffee mugs, bottles of drink. milk, a bucket, the sink, the tap, the bath, the shower, the toilet, peeing, the hose, the pool, a puddle, raindrops, the river, the ocean……… do you detect a theme here?

You can imagine him asking for a drink of cordial in his favourite plastic cup. “Mummy I want a cup of my cup in my cup on the cup”. Translate “Mummy I want a drink of my cordial in my cup thats on the sink”.  It was enough to make your head spin! I had to write a TJ dictionary that went with him to pre-school, Early Intervention and Speech Therapy. Thank God for mummy ESP! (the good kind Kelley, not the Jenny freak McCarthy kind)

Turns out that if he wasn’t sure what something was called that he would just call it by a word he knew. Suffice to say we did A LOT of vocabulary expansion with him before he could start school.

Last year though, I noticed that he was falling back into old habits where his reading was concerned. He started reading fairly well, but last year, as sounding words out got harder, he’d take the first letter of an unknown word and then apply a word he knew.  Crap! Yes it’s the same problem, but requires a different solution.

There is no speech therapy for school age children out here, so the school and I muddled through as best we could. His reading is improving, slowly, but he’s at the lower end of his grade.

Grandma (the lovely ex mil) gave the kids books for Christmas. TJ was given a book about dragons, in which the young hero has his name! Captured his imagination completely.

It’s a chapter book. He read a WHOLE chapter to me earlier tonight. With minimal help.

I’m so proud!! :):):)