A Funny Speech Session

This afternoon's speech session with Mary was the funniest session I've ever observed.

Even though Mary brought her three bags of goods last week, she still had a couple challenges with Raquel trying to dive right in to them - especially the bright yellow one. Today, Mary showed up with three PILLOW CASES instead! Raquel saw her pull up in the driveway and immediately ran to the door to greet her. As soon as Mary walked in with the pillow cases, Raquel cracked a big smile and started laughing. She totally knew why she brought them!

Once we sat down to start her session, Mary brought out these big animal puppets. One was a purple bird that made squawking noises. Raquel really took to that thing and must have played with it for 30 minutes. At first, she was startled by the noises. Raquel would go up to it and try to bite its nose and Mary would make it say, "SQUAAAAWWWK!!" really loud. Raquel jumped a couple times but then started doing it on purpose just to hear it scream at her. She was laughing and laughing and totally carrying on. And not just her typical laughing - we are talking about full on belly laughs where she was rolling on the floor and could hardly contain herself! It became contagious and pretty soon all three of us were laughing uncontrollably. Mary was so happy to see her demonstrate such an incredible sense of humor.

Mary also had these really cool magnetic animals. She had a cow, dog, horse & cat and this magnet stick that would lift them up. The animals (one by one) couldn't go back down until Raquel told them to do so, which she did. She was also choosing the animals by name. Mary did a couple tests for her Rosetti Assessment report that she has to turn in. One of them was Raquel picking out random items in a field of five. In the ABA sessions, she is required to pick the same item over again in a field of three. Today she had no problem identifying random items in a higher field. Mary also tested her on verb photos. She would show Raquel pictures of someone crying, eating, swinging, sleeping, etc. and ask her to choose what she was asking for. And she did great!

How were her vocals? Pretty limited due to all the laughing, although she was using functional speech when she was using it. Again, Mary is more encouraged to hear my list of words she uses in daily use instead of what she says during the speech sessions. I'm finally not offended when Raquel isn't vocal during speech. And it's only taken me 8 months to get to this point. :-)