"He wants to go home."

Narrative thinking. During snack, the Lark and I were listening to "Sloop John B," one of the Lark's new favorite songs. The Lark was listening intently, then he looked up at me and said earnestly, "He wants to go home." I had to suppress a laugh, because the singer/narrator says about 100 times, "I want to go home, let me go home." But I was encouraged nonetheless, because the Lark was thinking about this character's motivation, and then he shared his thoughts with me.

A few days ago I wrote about the importance of narrative thinking. Thinking narratively allows us to organize a vast array of information, sensations, and emotions into a coherent, meaningful whole. At the center of narrative thinking is the ability to understand and identify with the goals of the characters. The goals drive the narrative and allow the people hearing the narrative to organize and remember all kinds of information relative to that goal. In order to help the Lark with narrative thinking, we are trying to help him understand his own goals and intentions as well as those of other people. Today we worked on this in two ways--by acting out the story of some frogs who were sitting in the hot sun and jumped into a pond to get cool, and by playing a game that Tony came up with, where we present the Lark with a situation and ask him to think about how he would feel and what he would do in that situation. Both activities went well.

Ownership: Once again the Lark decided on his own to brush his hair upon noticing how messy it was. And once again he decided on his own to brush his teeth upstairs so he could use his tooth-brushing diagram.

Misc.: Math is continuing to go really well, with the Lark picking up new concepts with great ease. Jazz Chants, an activity we're doing for language fluency, is also going well.

Reciprocity: Tomorrow we're going to get back to our reciprocal games to help the Lark discover the other side of games like Tag and Hide & Seek.