Nelson and I had our second session of ‘It takes Two to Talk’ class. The class was more interesting today than the first session… at least I didn’t fall asleep. We did some role play today. Our speech therapist Cathy volunteered me to go in the front room with her while everyone else looked. She told me to pretend I am Nathan and show her what Nathan does with his toys. So I did some role play by playing with cars, throwing the toys, etc. Then Cathy showed us how we can facilitate communication with our child verbally and non-verbally while our child is playing.
The topic of today was OWL (Observe, Wait and Listen). We need to observe our child’s action. If Nathan is playing with his car, I should not only say the word ‘car’ but also mimic what he is doing to facilitate communication. At times if I just say the word car, Nathan won’t say anything back to me. There is no two way communication. But if I copy him by playing one of his cars and saying vroom vroom while playing with it, Nathan will likely say vroom vroom. If I crash the toy cars together and say ‘bang’, he will likely repeat after me and try to say ‘bang’. So I did exactly that and he did say vroom vroom and bang. This is one way to facilitate communication.
Communication should always be two ways. If I want to facilitate communication with my son, I shouldn’t do most of the talking. I should wait and listen and follow his lead. For instance, if we are looking at his book with pictures, I shouldn’t describe every picture he points at. When I describe every picture he points at, I am the one doing most of the talking. Nathan has this book called Blankie where the book actually has a cloth attach to it. Instead of having me tell him that he is pointing to a cloth, I have him feel the cloth that is attached to the book. So when we both feel the texture of the cloth, he giggles because it feels funny to him. Then he babbles about something like ‘wa, wa, eh, aa’. Our speech therapist says even if the word isn’t clear like if the child says ‘eh’ or ‘mm’, that is still communication. Since my son is only 2 years old, babbling ‘wa, wa, eh, aa’ is one way of him describing how he felt about touching the cloth.
While in class, our son was in day care. This day care isn’t for the public. It is only available for families who are in the speech therapy program.
Here is Nathan at the day care
Nathan was the only child in the day care today. There was another child at the day care earlier but she kept crying. So her mom had to bring her to our class. Her daughter was crying in class too but after giving her something to play with, her daughter stopped crying. There is another child that Nathan played with last week but he is out of town this week. Hopefully next week, Nathan will have playmates. But I am sure Nathan didn’t mind having all that space to play. I think the woman working at the day care likes Nathan because he doesn’t cry at all when we leave him and Nathan can pretty much play by himself. So her job of taking care of him is pretty easy going.