The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

As a Mom to two boys 11 and 6 and as a Pre-Kindergarten teacher I have seen first hand the successes and failures that children experience based on their early childhood experiences with language. My oldest son was diagnosed at 4 with receptive and expressive language disorders, he spent over a year 3x per week in language therapy to build his language skills. Receptive language disorder is the inability to keep words that you have heard and expressive language disorder is the inability to retrieve and say those words. You can see where we had a big problem on our hands. Not only could Conner not retain words but he also could not find them in his brain to say them. If you think of the brain like a filing cabinet it is as if his words were filed in the wrong drawer and were lost when needed. There was no specific language in our home, objects were described as "things" and this often lead to frustration for Conner when he could not describe what he was trying to say. His lack...

Hello Everyone, I have finally returned to my blogging world after a long break. It has been a hard year and while I have wanted to sit and blog often there just wasn't the time or energy. So here is the jist of it, I started off the school year 30lbs lighter thanks to an ugly strain of cyclospora (so my body was weak going into the year). September seemed uneventful as I happily awaited my brothers wedding which was going to send me from Texas to New Jersey and 3 days off of school but then my husbands grandmother passed and a 2nd trip to New Jersey was planned, putting me 2 more days in the hole. 5 days gone by mid October and then the big stuff started, are you ready?....Appendicitis with emergency surgery over thanksgiving break, tried to go back to work early and didn't even make it 3 hours! Another 5 days down the tubes. Then the next week the flu, of course setting me back another 2 days. Are you keeping track that is 10 days before Christmas! We only have PTO for 7! I s...