Teaching Jaide

Playing dress-up

Given her fiercely independent streak, Jaide is highly motivated to learn life skills. She is now very capable of helping me do chores around the house and is quickly learning to self-feed and even dress and undress by herself. Yet, perhaps because of that, she is not patient enough to articulate her needs for things she can't do herself. Or perhaps the muscles necessary for speech are not yet fully developed. Whatever the reason, Jaide is lagging behind in her vocabulary which makes it very hard to figure out what she wants to say. It took her ages to even call 'Mummy' and 'Daddy' properly. This very often leads to tantrums borne out of frustration. Thankfully, she is very happy when we successfully guess what she wants to say and will accept our explanations even if the answer is 'no'.

In order to accelerate the learning process, I've recently started structured home education to teach her the labels for things and how to pronounce the words properly. I make her repeat after me when I count the scoops of milk powder I put into milk bottles. Using toys, I help her recognize colours and I use books to encourage her to correctly name commonplace things. At each meal time, I also try to reinforce the names of the food instead of simply asking if she wants 'this' or 'that'. I don't remember having to work so hard to teach Joash and Jaide how to speak as they picked it up naturally by themselves, so I need to learn how to patiently and deliberately do it for Jaide.

It's very easy to assume that she is simply being rebellious, but having gone through the 'moving goal post' era with Jayna, dealing with the 'semi-visible goalpost' syndrome with Jaide is far easier to do for me. At least I know 'burl' means vegetables and 'siew' means tissue according to Jaide. May the Lord help Jaide to learn how to communicate well as soon as possible so that tantrums caused by misunderstanding what she wants will be reduced to the minimal.

Are you ready to revise the colours?

Which is the colour blue?

How about pink?

Is there purple somewhere?

Which is your favourite colour?

Yay! You got it all correct!

Where are the apples?

Yes, that's right! Watermelon!