Why it's so fun to be a student clinician

Today my 8:00 am client came, and I just can't describe how cute she is. Every session we work on narratives for a part of the time, and today I was focusing on teaching her how to start a story. Good stories start with a good description of the character involved and where the character lives, or in other words the setting needs to be described well.

So, in order to convey this to my client, we began by looking at a flower. My idea was to elicit various descriptions from her that could describe the flower. I thought we'd talk about where the flower lives and what the colors it had on it, and really basic simple descriptions.

This is how it really started:

K: What are some words we can use to describe this flower?
A: The flower is SO CUTE! (I would have bet someone a million dollars that this would be her first description, it is her favorite adjective)
K: How else can we describe the flower?
A: It has pink fingernail polish.
K: Oh really? What are these called?
A: {Blank stare}
K: These are petals. What color are they?
A: Lellow!
K: That's right this flower has yellow petals. What other colors does it have?
A: It has pink fingernail polish!
K: Okay, {me pointing to the leaves} what are these?
A: A stem.
K: {Me pointing to the stem and then the leaves} Yes, this is a stem and these are leaves. What color are the leaves.
A: Green.

After continuing on in this manner for sometime....

K: Okay let's use all these words together to describe the flower. You start, use all the words we just talked about, to describe the flower.
A: {After a long pause} This flower is so cute and it has pink fingernail polish!
K: What else can we say about the flower, using the words that we just talked about?
A: {Blank stare}

She is the cutest little girl ever! And I had a hard time not cracking up every time she mentioned the fingernail polish. The picture above is the actual picture we used for our description practice. As you can clearly see, the flower has neither fingernails nor is it the color pink. I just love that little girls her age are always so obsessed with these things. Life would be far less entertaining if they weren't.

The Best Part About Parent Teacher Conferences

Last week I got to travel down to Ogden and help translate Spanish/English for the parent teacher conferences. It was really fun, and I had a great time being able to help out, but the funniest part was listening to all of the stories that parents shared with the teachers:

One teacher mentioned to a parent that her child had mentioned that they'd lost their cat. The parent said, "Oh yes, we looked high and low for that cat, inside and outside the house. We knew that the cat had been sick so we were afraid that it had died somewhere inside the house." Okay, so yes ew, gross.

They eventually found the cat A WEEK after they had started searching for it. One of the kids lifted up the cushions on the sofa and looked under only to discover the cat there. Apparently the family has several other pets that roam freely about the house as well.

I don't know if I would ever admit to something like that happening in my house, and I can gaurentee that the sofa would have left the house along with the cat. Yuck! You know what, though? Teachers have some of the best stories I've ever heard!