Taking success where I find it

We are settling into our school schedule without any difficulty. I think people are a little relieved to have some structure to their days again. As I mentioned before, with R. stabilized, I an back to doing school with her. My very modest hopes were that should would be able to count and write up to the number three and to be able to write her name. 

Well, based on three days of work, I may need to modify those plans. The name writing? I might need to change that to recognizing the initial consonant of her name. Letters and sounds and words just have very little meaning for her. 

But numbers are a different story. She has been pretty good at the number one for a while. The past few days we've been working on the number two. Here's what we ended up with today.


That would be the numeral two written freehand without help, just looking at the example, and two circles she drew to show what "2" meant. This is possibly the most advanced work she has ever done.

You can also bet it took me half a second to decide this was our win for today and end on a positive note. I knew without any doubt that if I were to ask her to do it again, she wouldn't be able to. My hope is that by trying to only have the correct answer be given that we will strengthen those neural connections so that they become more reliable.

I hope you know I'm just making this up as I go along, right? There is just no blueprint for a child such as R., and I'm pretty sure anybody else would be making it up as well.

And then I look at what H. is doing. That would be the child who took four years to be able to get past the number four. She was successfully borrowing and carrying with three digit numbers today. 

You just never know what the future will hold.

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