February 2013 Updates: Hahgoot’s Updates!

Hahgoot got some new OT related equipment this month: A cool blue weighted vest and a red weighted blanket. She wears the vest every afternoon and at various times during the weekend, and also in the car for long rides or after\during events that are a sensory overload (shopping centres, play dates). The blanket is used at night and has reduced her “falling asleep time” from three hours to 10 minutes! Amazing! Despite being generally well balanced most of the time, we still had a few outbursts and minor meltdowns (like the one on the left, after I asked her to spread butter on her bread by herself).

Hahgoot has been using the swivel chair often to spin herself out of a bad mood and discovered she can spin herself standing up (probably will become an OH&S issue...). Her sister of course picked up the new skill in no time (and she goes really fast!)

Hahgoot started swimming classes at the Eva Bory swim school in Emu Plains. Here she is with her instructor, Shar (short for Sharwana). Hahgoot is in one of the beginner classes, Squids, and hopefully will finish it able to swim dog paddle independently and float.

Hahgoot cooperated with the lesson quite well and was positive, and didn’t complain about it every Saturday, which in itself is a success. She found floating on her back difficult as she didn’t like the sensation of water on her ears, and didn’t like jumping in the water. As she has some Dyspraxia (motor planning issues), the instructor needs to break down the movements for her as she doesn’t “get” anything “naturally”.

Hahgoot started the year very positively with a few awards, and the teacher (after a long chat with me) quickly addressed her issues with orientation and organization. Mrs Chan, the class teacher, has a very impressive classroom library, and she has been recommending very good books from much higher levels.

Mrs Chan gives a lot of homework (which I am happy about, but Hahgoot might beg to differ...) and also gives Hahgoot extension maths questions and harder spelling words. The first week Hahgoot got homework I had her sign a contract that she has to be positive, communicative and independent with her homework all year. She signed it and since then we had no problems. Very “Super nanny”, but it worked... Should have done it in Kindy!

Left: I work with her on maths from other books (this is a year 3 workbook). Hahgoot showed interest in learning how to draw in 3D, so I used the maths book to explain some principles. Right: Hahgoot kept reading about colour theory and discovered some interesting names of shades

Left: In Hebrew we kept studying poetry and in order to keep Hahgoot engaged I used transparencies and comics for completing tasks. Right: now that she read all the Captain Underpants books, she was happy to read chapter books on her own with no arguments.

The BJE studies resumed. This time I asked for the Year 3 workbooks, so she could get more challenging tasks. The topic was of course Purim. Hahgoot played out the Megilah story with dolls and got a Mishloach Manot from BJE.

I added extension work: Hahgoot used the Tal-Am workbook for year 5 to read further about the holiday’s customs. The unit focused on humour, so she read jokes and even wrote her own, in Hebrew! That was a big challenge, on many levels.

In Israel I got Hahgoot a cute and colourful workbook in Hebrew about Purim and she liked it very much. It had jokes, small tasks and a funny Megilah story, which she acted out using puppets she made. She enjoyed the funny play so much she did it twice, on her own!

Learning about Purim was also a good excuse to double her reading load, so she got to read Funny stories about Kofiko’s adventures (left) and short stories from Year 1 and 2 readers.

Hahgoot kept up her correspondence this month: She answered Lotem from Israel and got nice letters from Caitlin, which we haven’t seen in a while.

Hahgoot enjoyed the game “Camelot Junior” she got from her aunt Debbie for Christmas. Very quickly she advanced to Expert level, with the designs becoming more and more complex.

In our next presentation: Alma’s updates!