Always improving!

Gabriel is doing great socially. At school he is very popular and always has a friend to talk about at home. My husband and I recently decided to engage Gabriel is some afterschool activities at the recreation center to further broaden his social network. He is great with his little sister and very rarely gets upset. He has no emotional problems, but can take a little while to calm down after getting upset. I think this is due to some recent arguments my husband and I have been having but we have assured Gabriel that we love him and his sister very much and that these arguments don’t change that. We are trying to keep these arguments from him and hoping that his behavior gets even better.

Gabriel has shown steady improvement in his cognitive skills. At 4 years old, Gabriel was a typical preschooler cognitively speaking. He didn’t really understand conservation or seriation. However, he asked questions about animals, nature, and how things work. He also liked simple board games with dice or other counting games. We wanted to accelerate Gabriel's thinking skills, so we introduced new games when we thought he would enjoy them. Now I think all that patience has paid off. At almost seven years old, Gabriel's memory is getting better. He is great at memory games such as Concentration because he remembers where the cards are located. He still has a little trouble sometimes and when he tells people about things that happened to him, he leaves a lot of details out and sometimes gets the order wrong. I try to join in the retelling of the experience, prompting Gabriel with questions, rather than just telling it myself.

His language skills have also improved. At 4 years old, Gabriel had already learned most of the letters and their sounds from watching educational TV, and from games and songs at preschool. He could write his own name and read a few words. He was very interested in listening to books. Now, Gabriel is communicating in grammatically correct sentences for the most part, and has a vocabulary that's steadily expanding. In first grade, he really seems to be taking off, and is reading first and even second grade books. We are great he has found a love of reading and encourage this whenever possible.

So far it seems that Gabriel has no special needs when it comes to these developmental areas. We are going to continue working with Gabriel to improve his skills and we believe he will continue to develop appropriately.

Gabriel has been a very physically active child since he was younger. He has always enjoyed running and playing and being rambunctious. This is still true and my husband and I have recently enrolled Gabriel in soccer and baseball to allow Gabriel a place to be active. He also continues to be avidly curious about the world around him and we continue to try to take Gabriel to new places and give him hands on activities to learn from. While Gabriel has always enjoyed music and dancing, he recently has shown great talent in music and we have enrolled him in piano and singing lessons to try to develop these skills more.