moving up from the MINC program...

Originally it was a judgment call between putting Ella into a MINC-T (multiple intense needs class for toddlers), or putting her into the normal special ed toddler class. Ultimately, the MINC was chosen to afford Ella extra therapy time, and a smaller class for her first school.

Recently, the paperwork was done for Ella's school starting this fall. For age reasons, she's going to be moving from toddler class to preschool class. Given how well she's been doing in the classroom, and how well she socializes with other children, the staff recommended that Ella move up from the MINC program to the normal special ed preschool. We've decided to go ahead and do that.

This does mean Ella's one-on-one time with school therapists will be going down, but it also means the class activities will be more challenging for Ella, and provide her with better opportunities to advance on her own or from her peers. With her current progress in motor and social areas, I think this is very important. She's also been babbling back-and-forth with her peers, and this class is also likely to have more students in it for Ella to "talk" to.

This isn't terribly fresh news, as we've known about it for a while, but the paperwork was finalized this past week, so I figured it's past due to put it up on the blog.

Go Ella Go!

Blowing bubbles..

After recently figuring out how to purse her lips to blow on things with a focused stream (instead of just going "Ha" at them) over the weekend, on Tuesday Ella figured out how to use this skill to dip a bubble wand, pull it out and blow bubbles.

It's not a huge step, but it's progress in her oral motor skills, and her application of them. Since that's an area where she's been progressing very slowly, this makes me very happy.

slow but steady progress

I haven't posted in a while, mostly because nothing "unusually exciting" has happened with Ella lately.

Of course there's lots of small cute things she does every day, and perhaps I should make a point to post more of those. Thinking of that, here's one now:

A couple of nights ago, when Ella got in bed after her bath, she started giggling and shaking her head all over the place while laying down. This, of course, made a giant mess of her freshly combed hair, and I commented "Oh, you're going to be fuzzy tomorrow". She immediately stopped, looked at me, and started stroking my beard. "Yes, fuzzy, like daddy's beard". It was immensely cute.

As for progress, Color wise, Ella's starting to get the hang of identifying and signing black and brown, although these are still a bit rough and she'll sometimes label black things as being brown.

Motor wise, Ella's continuing to get more confident and bold climbing on play structures, stepping over things, jumping, etc. It's all very gradual, but looking back at even a month ago, her ability to navigate barriers is much smoother now.

On the speech front, Ella's continuing to babble, and it's still mostly "Da". However we are starting to get her to vary the sounds a bit. She's sometimes distinguishing vowel sounds to make word approximations. Most of the time it's all just "da" or "da da", but sometimes she'll intentionally shift towards "eh-da!" (ella), "die" (bye), and rarely she'll even make a little twist towards "Dahn" (done) although it's still more like "Dahd".

We've also recently seen a return of B and R sounds, although these are rare just like "tooka" "Ha" and "Ga" are.

At any rate, I hope you all are well! Hope to see you all soon.