Raising the Bar

The Lark seemed to be getting tired of some of our activities--certain song-games and "act-outs." I was trying to think of new activities, but then I remembered one of the many things I learned from doing RDI: you don't need to keep coming up with new activities; you just have to keep adding new challenges to the ones you're doing. This worked really well today. For instance, there's this one tiny little "scene" we perform, in which I'm usually the narrator and the Lark does the actions. Today I had the Lark do the narration (it's very short and simple) while I did the actions. He seemed to enjoy this, and he did such a good job. He left out a bit, but he got the main idea, and his intonation was perfect! I also asked him to lead us in our morning warm-up activities (seasonal songs with movements). I gave him a list of the songs and let him initiate and guide us through each one. Again, he did a great job.

As part of our calendar activities, every day we locate the current day on a big calendar, and then follow the instructions we find written there. It's usually a two-step instruction (e.g., find the last day of May and draw a stop sign on it; find the first Saturday in May and draw a star on it). Today for the first time the Lark was able to complete the first step and then remember and perform the second step without any help and without even looking back at the instruction.