My wonderful son Nathan turned 3 in November 2013. It brought an end to the most difficult and challenging year of my life but one that has taught me the value of good support networks, research and especially that you are never to old learn. My local community and friends helped collect old mobile phones which I exchanged with IAA for an iPad for Nathan. Truthfully this became a major turning point for us. I was totally shocked, in a few hours he had figured out how to use the computer and was flying along using apps. Visual stimulus is 100% the key to Nathan’s learning experience but it has to be interactive like the computer or iPad, books etc. are of no interest to him. My Aunt gave me a newspaper cutting about Animated Language Learning and I decided to research further as I am always looking for ways to help my son develop the skills he needs. I had several phone conversations with Enda regarding Nathan and if he would be suitable to start the programme as he was about 30 months old.
Nathan started the programme the end of July and really enjoyed the first chapter as it involved choosing pictures and earning video clips of toy story as a reward. we quickly worked up to 15 minutes per day – at this stage Nathan was non-verbal using only 1 word but surprising to me he quickly started saying Woodie and the different characters names. He struggled when we moved on to further chapters involving typing as he didn’t know his alphabet and this resulted in him not being interested in the typing. After 2 months both Enda and myself agreed it would be best for Nathan to leave the programme and to work on his basic skills of learning his alphabet so he would have better understand of what was being requested of him in the programme when we return to it again. Nathan is making great progress as we are following the skills and learning method we learned using ALL. In 3 months he has learned his ABC’s and numbers 1-20 both to say and read. His speech had developed so much that I am excited waiting for his next review, he can label a few hundred objects now and can sing several nursery rhymes his words are not totally clear yet but that will come with more practice. I have decided that next challenge for us will be to teach him to read and following that to type. At that stage we will return to ALL.
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