Recently, I was assessing our preschoolers. I asked one of our 4 year old boys who is on the Autism Spectrum to count as high as he could. He was kind of crouching with his feet on his chair. As he counted, he stood up a little more with each number. By the time he got to 7, he was standing all the way up. In all my years, I had never seen a child do that. He was literally counting “as high as he could.” I tried a different way. I asked him to sit back down, then start at 1, and keep going. He did the same thing… I thought about going back into the classroom to ask the Special Ed teacher for some tips… I asked him to stand on the floor, start at 1, then keep counting until he didn’t know any more numbers. Again, he crouched down, then counted to 7, standing up a little more with each number. He proudly said, “I’m as high as I can go!”
Another 4 year old girl, when asked to count as high as she could, said 1, and looked up to the ceiling… These two examples were great reminders to me that some people take what we say quite literally. I guess I need to work on finding better wording to get what I’m looking for out of these kiddos!
I assessed the 3 year olds in the classroom. I was so exhausted by the end of the day…. I was asking one little girl to identify some letters. When I pointed to the Ii, I think she actually said, “Oh, that’s a letter Ii.” What I heard, was “Oh, that’s a glass of wine!” I wondered what she actually said, so I asked her again, and she said something else completely… I guess I’ll never know if she actually identified the letter Ii, or if she really thought it looked like a glass of wine. In my defense, she did say the letter Ll was a sock, so anything is possible. haha
My co-teacher and I were doing Parent-Teacher conferences last week. One set of parents was sitting across from us, telling us about how their son has 2 (or was it 3?) sisters, and another one will be coming next month. We both said, “Wow.” He continued on to say that they had to keep having children, because “What if 3 of them are bad? We need to have at least a couple more to up the chance of having at least 2 good ones.” We weren’t really sure if he was serious, or kidding, but we both were laughing pretty hard. He also was talking about how kids these days put their parents in nursing homes, so they want to make sure there will be at least one that will take care of them when they are old [totally makes sense]. He pointed to his wife, and said “She carries you in her belly for 9 months, and you want to put her in a nursing home?” Gotta admit… he has a point.
My final story, that amused me in the past couple weeks, was when we had the balance beam in our classroom. It’s only about 6″ off the ground, but it’s just high enough to be scary for kids who haven’t had experience with something like that. One 3 year old girl was walking along it with one foot on the beam, one foot on the ground. After doing that a couple times, I asked her to just try it with two feet on the beam. She was scared. When she got about halfway across, I told her I would hold her hand. Holding my hand (barely), she successfully maneuvered the beam with two feet. The next several times she tried it on her own, she did the first half with one foot on, and one foot off, but got to the halfway point, and walked the second half with two feet on the beam. She was so proud of herself! I am hoping that this week, she will try the whole thing with both feet. It’s so fun to watch their confidence grow with practice!!
These are just a few of the stories from the past couple of weeks. I will try to be better at writing them all down for your entertainment, as well as mine! I just LOVE preschoolers!! 🙂
Moments of Brilliance... or Not! 