Taking advantage: zoo

Sometimes you gotta do things you don't want to do. It's just part of life. And that's okay.

But sometimes it helps to be flexible.

I had a plan. I got a whole bunch of books on birds from the library to read and study birds with Jman. We still may do that. But yesterday, I noticed that Jman had been looking at one of our books he pulled off the shelf. First I noticed he had it in his bedroom. Then later I noticed it laying on the table in the living room. And I had one of those marvelous, wonderful thoughts: Why not ask Jman if he'd like to read THAT book with me?

Well, I made the offer, and actually much to my surprise, he enthusiastically accepted. The book is a little cheapo book I've had for years that I picked up for a dollar somewhere (the price tag says 99 cents), about the size of a lil golden book. It's called "Zoo Fun." I asked Jman if he wanted to read "Zoo Fun," and he said, "Zoo Fun!!!" with a big smile. All righty, then! We headed to the couch to get comfy and read.

Well, in this little cheapo book, two friends go to the zoo. On each page they visit a different zoo animal and pretend to be that animal. So, for example, it starts with them visiting the elephant and they pretend to be elephants. What's kind of neat and what seemed to have Jman's attention is that the 'pretending' is set apart in smaller little circle pictures on the page. Jman likes to copy faces and poses that he sees in pictures or videos. If you've heard of echolalia--imitating or echoing what others say--then you could think of this as a kind of motor-echo thing--imitating or echoing what others DO. The separate little pictures of the kids pretending to be the animals in this book were just the perfect scaffolding for Jman to do the same thing. And that's where it really got FUN.

Now, I didn't actually try to READ the book with Jman. There's just too many words and it would have been a drag. Instead, we looked at the pictures and I commented and/or asked questions based on the limited sentence structures we're targeting in everyday language work--This is (an elephant), What do you see?, etc. So, after I commented and/or Jman spoke about what we saw on the page, I began to imitate the kids imitating the elephant. Jman watched, and before long he was joining me! Way cool! Anytime you can get more than one part of the brain working in the learning and interacting, you're doing good stuff. Here we had 'reading' the book going on, AND had movement and motor activities going on as well!

The next page was a 'tall' giraffe--an opportunity to work on a vocabulary word (tall vs short) and a chance to STRETCH tall like a giraffe. He was right there with me, having fun. He began anticipating what would be next, enjoying the page and activity we were on for a time and then eager to try what was going to be next! You just can't force that kind of interest!

Together we were roaring lions, leaping gazelles, monkeys, penguins, bats, and more. A couple highlights were when he asked for a banana when imitating the boy imitating the monkey (the boy had a banana, the girl did not), and also when we were on the gazelle page. That was an animal he didn't know the name for (no big surprise there!). I modeled for him, and he said, "gazelle." Then he posed like the kids were posing in the book, but what the kids were REALLY doing was leaping, not posing. I began to model leaping around the room for him, and he just thought that was terrific! He joined right in, and we were leaping gazelles together! Following that, he was even looser and more animated, and we got up to waddle like penguins, swim like dolphins, and fly like bats! He even used a pillow over his back like a cape, imitating the kids using capes for bat wings in their picture. Pretty darn cute.

When we got to the end of the book, Jman sat down and 'rewound' it. (He always finishes a book by going quickly backwards through all the pages from the end to the beginning, and then closing the book with the front cover up.) As we were going along in reading the book, I was reviewing the animals we had become so far, naming them as I pretended to be them quickly. When we got to the end, I reviewed for him again the animals that we had pretended to be, from first to last (yes, I had them in order in my short term memory--reviewing and moving will do things like that for ya!). Jman was watching and began to join me, though in a more subdued fashion, laying back on one of the couches. I pulled out my cell phone and snapped a few pictures of his animal poses until my phone rang (Habeeb was inviting us to come in for lunch! yea!).

Now, another piece of info to share is that Jman has never been interested in the zoo. When we've gone, he's typical response is to walk up to whatever exhibit we force him to go up to and to say 'bye-bye' to whatever animal is there and then leave. "Bye-bye, Camel! I'm SO outta here!" BUT now we have this little shared experience with his "Zoo Fun" book. And I'm going to take advantage of it! Nothing like being flexible, ya know! The bird books are going back to the library, and we are going to the zoo. I'm also gonna look for other zoo related games, activities, books, whatever. Maybe Jman and I will make our own 'Zoo Fun' book, complete with pix of animals, a few animal sentences practicing his language goals, and pix of us pretending to be those animals! Wouldn't that be COOL!?!?!!? Will it all get done? I don't know. But I'm gonna riding this wave as long as it lasts. One always learns best when he's interested in the material, and I'm gonna take advantage of Jman's interest in his little cheapo "Zoo Fun" book and the memory we made and shared yesterday reading and playing together.