20 Questions, Part II

My interrogating Misha on his day has started to pay off. It's quite exciting, actually.

Yesterday, I picked Misha up from nursery. He was happy to go, of course. Really a good thing. He is happy to go to nursery and happy to leave. No complaining, either way. Anyway, I digress.

As we were leaving nursery, walking down the hall to the room where Ira teaches, Misha pulled his hand out of mine and stopped. I stopped as well. Misha then started signing to me. He signed "play", so I confirmed/asked him if he played in nursery. He responded verbally with "ball". Then he signed food, so I asked him what he had for snack. He usually doesn't respond to this one without prompting, but this time he signed "crackers" and said "nana". That is marked improvement.

This is unique in that he is not asking for something. He is volunteering information without prompting. This is great.

Monkey see, monkey do

As an aficionado of music, Misha will jump through hoops to listen to music he likes. Alisa reported the other day that Misha had tried to play a CD in the stereo. He must have observed Kiril doing this cause the downstairs is often turned into a discotheque.

Evidently, he procured a CD from one of the disc books hanging around. He walked over to the stereo "blowing" on the CD. Misha is working on blowing and so far puts his upper-lip over his lower and blows down. We are still working on that. Then he pushed the Open/close button, and put the disc in . It wasn't in correctly so it didn't close all the way, so he further attempts at getting it to play were foiled. But it's just another case at how observant Misha really is.

20 questions

Misha is enjoying his school experience. He is progressing steadily in their curriculum and that is nice to see. So when I get home from work, I try to get some interaction going by questioning him on his day. There is kind of a format on getting Misha started with these kind of things. This usually involves prompting him with pointed questions that I generally know the answers to.

So it started out with something like "Misha, did you play at school today?" And Misha would then sign "play". Then we continued on to the next question.

Now I ask Misha what he did and he will sign "play". I can then ask him what else he did and he will answer. I am still prompting him about doing puzzles and color sorting but since neither of us know the signs for those, it's hard to get him to do that one. But I will ask him about his lunch and what he ate.

The same tactic I approached when teaching him to pray. Sometimes I would/will ask the kids who would like to pray. Misha started answering "Yah!" (russian for 'me'). So I started verbally "assisting" him to pray. Then I thought, "Wait a minute, he can sign!" and so I started trying to teach him some signs for praying. At first, it was all prompt, but lately he has got a hold of the concept and is doing stuff on his own. This usually cracks the kids up. For instance, last night he was in the "thanking" part of his prayer. He signed "thank you" then "food", then "mama", "food", and then said "Baba" (grandma), said "Mama", "Bya-bya", and "Ga-ga" (see last blog). Then we bless the food and he signs "Jesus" and said "Amin'".

So now I need to work on my signing vocab, so that I can teach him some more school and prayer words.