Ha! Anything is useful. I'm just ta tryin' ta get thinkin'
DS did "associative play" from birth, and is already starting to do truely co-operative play. This seems to be less of a problem when parents are not around, because the kids kinda work things out for themselves, and DS will only accept "no" from the kid themselves, if a parent says he shouldn't tackle their kid, he's like "wha'cha on about, let her tell me if she don't like it" <sigh>. He likes kids of all ages, and will prefer whoever is paying hte most attention to him, which is often the younger kids, whom he can entertain, and the older kids, who will play with him, but rarely the kids in his current age group, who tend to be into parrallel play & saying "mine" a lot.
I'm shy of a lot of directed activities, that's where DS gets really annoyed (why I was so impressed when he complied with the circle time so maturely). His motor skills (fine and gross, both) are a little ahead, mainly because we let him do a lot of stuff that other kids are "protected" from, and handed a set of materials, he tries to think of all the things he can do with them, rather than wanting to do what everyone else is already doing... But I suppose I'd like to see open-ended here's an experience type activities, where figureing out all the things he can do with XYand Z is actually the adult's percieved goal.
Do academic programmes really use language at a higher level, or do they push the level they think is age appropriate? I'm worried that if they're too convinced they know what DS needs at his age, they'll have an even harder time seeing/hearing him. (I suppose we could show them the report from the SLP that says his expressive lang is c.4yrs and receptive ceilinged their tests [6rys+], but would that really make them talk to him differently? In my experience it doesn't usually sink in.
Based on the books he likes, which I can find age-associations for, ideally, they need to talk to him (answer questions etc) about the way they would with a third grader, but not an average 3rd grader, because he's 2.... so it's a big leap & not a tidy, developmentally normal "just treat him like he's older" thing... When I talk to him seriously, I use a lot of the tricks I learned dealing with adults with Aphasia.
I'm wondering where we'd be mostly likely to find people who can scale different aspects of thier communication/communicative expectations SEPERATELY.
I don't think we'll find something perfect, and I don't think we shoudl try to find something perfect, just for the record. And Frankly, I think he'll be basically fine anywhere. I just wanna do my best here
And we don't know for sure that he's ahead or gifted or whatever, although I think it's a good guess at this point. I'd be uncomfortable presenting him in that way, or asking for an older group for him, just because we really don't know. What we really KNOW about him is that his development is very atypical, and for the language stuff, we have a clear evaluation that puts him out on an extreme both in terms of being genuinely ahead on some measures, and having a pretty extreme discrepancy between measures (that's the atypical development bit).
Like I said, I'm just overthinking... but I *like* overthinking
-Mich
