Hollering at Therapy

Yesterday was AV Therapy and it was highly entertaining. As you can imagine, therapy is a little hit-and-miss when it involves a one year old, but yesterday, Tessa was engaged the entire hour. Our time consisted of listening to the sounds farm animals make, following instructions to put the animals in their barn, initiating a vocalization to have us roll the ball, imitating the "up, up, up" short sounds and "d-o-w-n" long sounds of the airplane, blowing and "pop, pop, pop"-ing bubbles, and last but not least.... hollering for her brother!

Ms. Tami's final idea for the day was to demonstrate hollering for Parker in hopes that Tessa would attempt to vocalize the same thing. After several hollers of "P-a-r-k-e-r"...."P-a-r-k-e-r"..."P-a-r-k-e-r" we waited, and I think to all of our surprise, we heard from Miss Tessa..."aaaaaaaa-k"! Needless to say, we all cheered with joy and then frantically asked Parker to come over to his sister to help reinforce her hollering for him! We have never heard Tessa make the "k" sound, so it was a very exciting moment.

The reality hit, that Tessa is probably saying a lot more than we can actually understand right now. Our priorities are definitely to teach Tessa how to listen and follow directions (her receptive language), but let's be real...it's pretty freakin cool to witness her attempts to communicate with us!!

We all learn by listening and observing...but isn't it nice to be praised when something profound comes out of our own mouth!

~Whitney