by Brian
Recently Jolee has been having difficulty formulating her thoughts and holding conversations with us. From preschool through her teen years, Jolee attended weekly 1:1 speech class with the same phenomenal speech therapist, Ms. Jennifer. We reconnected with her and planned to have Jolee go in for some refresher sessions to get back on track. Jolee, however, was adamantly against the idea.
I am amazed by how Bobbie always knows the right thing to do. She connected with Ms. Jennifer ahead of time and discussed the plan to use Jolee’s art to drive conversation. As expected, Jolee was very anxious and argumentative heading into speech class. When she came out afterward, however, it was a completely different story. Jolee was over-the-top excited about how Ms. Jennifer loved Jolee’s creativity, talking endlessly about her characters and her artwork on our Exiting the Nest blog.
Since that day, Jolee now looks forward to these sessions and meeting regularly to talk to Ms. Jennifer. They are using story starters, where Jolee is given a brief intro topic and then she has to create the rest of the story using her characters. Who knew that Jolee’s creativity could provide the burst of confidence we needed to get her conversation skills back on track!