Hodgepodge Post

So many things to write about, and to save time, it's all going in one post!

First, Ivelina has officially been in her forever home for  3 months!  Wow! With every month that ticks by, I am amazed at Ivie's progress. There are bad days (and bad weeks), but she has been steadily learning, growing, attaching, and improving!  We are so proud of her. 

Doctors told us that the three month mark would be when she would really start forgetting her native language and adding TONS of new English. This has definitely been true of Ivelina. In the past two weeks, we have noticed a dramatic increase in Ivie's vocabulary. She asks us to say things and sing things all the time so that she can listen for the pronunciation. She repeats EVERYTHING we say. It is apparent that her receptive language is even greater than her expressive language. She understands everything we're talking about.... no sneaky conversation about us eating ice cream after her bedtime is going to get by her little ears!

Ivelina is working very hard to learn the abc song. She listens to it on abcmouse.com over and over and over. She wants us to sing it over and over for her. In the car, she wants to listen to it on repeat. She can now sing A-G, then the middle gets jumbled up until letter Q. She sings Q R S with lots of gusto then mumbles her way all the way to the W and the Z.  lol!  It's pretty cute. 

This brings me to the subject of school. My last post was about our difficulties with Ivelina's behavior during school time. I'm happy to say that our new procedures and rules and rewards system for school have been effective this past week. She earned some candies every day, and the instant visual rewards really help keep her motivated. The school rules are ones we remind her of all during the day, and she understands our expectations very well. 

This past week, Ivelina learned letter Z.  We have been doing the letters that have animal themes because we are going to the zoo this Friday!!  I am more excited than anyone I think, but we have an awesome zoo, and I just know Ivelina is going to have the time of her life!  At least....I hope so!

We began last weekend by checking these out from the library. Ivie loved the zebra in this movie. It really got her pumped to learn more about zebras during the week.

Here are just a few of the zoo books we have been reading and, of course, Ivelina's book zoo that she is adding to each day!

Ivelina is adding a new animal coloring page to her zoo book each day. When she first came home, she really hated coloring, but now she is a lot more willing to color during school time. We are working on using appropriate colors now. Notice: she is holding her brown monkey while coloring the monkey brown!   =)

This week she made Z's with stickers, with a BINGO stamp, with torn paper, and with some old zippers I had laying around.