Haley Climbing
PLEASE NOTE this post is from 4/12/2009
This paragraph is new content.
It’s funny I’m reading this post a year later and decided to re-run the post. I haven’t bloged on the site in a while and I’m reading through the archives. After reading this post I’m baffeled by the fact that I didn’t talk about when Haley first learned how to climb. It was on the stairs. Haley is an auditory learner and she often needs to tell herself what to do next. When she hears what she should do her brain is able to process the instructions and make her physical body work but when she just sees what she should do she can not process it as well. An example of this is when she learned to climb the stairs. She learned and memorized a cadence. Hand Hand Knee Knee Foot Foot. Once she had this cadence memorized she was able to climb the stairs. I think of that cadence when I remember the instructions I gave her for climbing this structure. She really can do anything she wants as long as she is determined to do it.
Original Post was April 12, 2009
Today was an awesome day. Haley and I went on a date to the park. We went to a park that she does not usually go to. As soon as we arrived there was an ice cream truck so we got some ice cream bars. After eating the bars we went on the swings which is always her first adventure at any park. After the swings she went over to the little kid play structure. She always plays on the little kid structures first if she is at a place she doesn’t know well. It’s sort of a warm up. Anyway we went over to the big play structure after she was comfortable. This structure was really good for her since it had stairs and handle bars all the way to the top and there was no where were the was an opening on both sides. But whenever Haley gets nervous she resorts to crawling. So we walked through the structure together a few times until she felt comfortable walking through the entire structure.
This play set also had a plastic rock wall. Not the kind that is planks of wood with hand grips but more of a molded plastic that actually looks like rock. Anyway after looking at it and asking Haley if she wanted to try it and failing miserably once we took a step back and looked at what we wanted to achieve. First I explained how she could go from one smallest step to the next then I showed her where the smallest steps were and how she could get from one to the next. Then we tried it together. She climbed 2-3 times with assistance and then she decided to try it on her own. She did it. She did it well, and She is AWESOME!!! Here is some video I ended up taking on my cell phone.
