Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Weekly Update -- 1 - 7 March 2010

Yay, I', 165 weeks old today!

Masinja had a pretty calm week for a change. About the only things to report on are OT and Speech. During OT he worked on stringing noodles once again. He still gets frustrated with it when the string doesn't go in on the first try but he seemed to have improved a bit since last week. He also worked with beads and dowels. Instead of using the Duplos, his therapist tried to get him to copy the pattern that she was making with the beads. Masinja didn't quite understand the concept at first but I think that was because he was too distracted by the beads. He kept trying to put his beads on the same dowel as the OT. After a few tries he finally understood what he was supposed to do although he still didn't quite get the pattern right. He kept doing the opposite. For example, if the OT put a red bead, blue bead and then purple bead on her dowel Masinja would put the purple bead first, then the blue bead, and lastly the red bead. He has been doing something similar with the wooden blocks that his Speech therapist uses. I guess he just sees things backwards. Masinja's OT also began working with him on undressing and dressing. He has quite a bit of difficulty with this task. He understands that his shirt needs to go over his head but he doesn't quite know what to do with his arms. When he tries to take his shirt off he winds up getting stuck! He doesn't really understand how to pull his pants on or off either. This is something that we are really going to have to work on at home. His OT still has not been able to track down the Sensory Profile. Hopefully next week she will have located it so we can address the sensory issues.

Speech was pretty uneventful. Masinja is still working on the same skills he has been working on for the past few months. While his vocabulary has grown quite a bit, he is still struggling with some basic concepts. We are still working on getting him to differentiate between boy and girl. This is important because the goal is for him to add more nouns, pronouns and verbs to his vocabulary so he can start to form his own sentences. Most of the sentences that he says now are just repetition of the things that we say to him on a daily basis. We are also continuing to work on gross motor imitation. His therapist decided that since he likes the vocabulary cards so much she would try to get him to imitate some of the actions depicted. He did fairly well on some of them. Imitation is extremely important for him not just for language development but also in terms of learning how to play.

That's all for now.

Peace,
T.M.M.

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