Draw a man test

Shanna's person that she drew right after she turned 4

yesterday's bike ride

love this gate

Tess before her haircut. She obviously is excited

after.  Not much difference

We used to have a mom in the Moms group who had a degree in Special Ed and was in charge of administering kindergarten readiness tests in her district. One of the screens was the Draw a Man or Person test. The child is not to be prompted. No what about the ears. Kids will do better if they have had prompts in the past. But the test is a quick screen of maturity, not necessarily of artistic ability. Passing 'men' should have a head, body, arms and legs. Limbs should come out of the body, not the head. Extra body parts are a bonus. Since I judged Shanna to be so advanced, I gave her this test a full year before she was in kindergarten. The results are above. She has elbows, shoulder blades (coming out of the neck), eyelids and lashes and fingers along with a few more bonus items. Yep, she would have passed with flying colors but she was 'advanced'. Josh would not have done so well even though he probably was more artistic than Shanna. Naomi was the most artistic but I don't know if she drew a person so early.

 

Flash forward to yesterday during Maya's parent-teacher conference. She had two 'persons' that Maya had drawn. One 6 weeks ago that consisted of a badly drawn circle with arms and legs coming out of it, something a 30 month old could have drawn. The second, drawn very recently, actually was close to passing, as it had a head, a body, arms and legs though the arms came out of the head. It also had eyes, a nose, mouth and ears though nothing was close to the correct proportions. It represented a huge leap in maturity. Her chief weakness is very poor fine motor skills in writing and drawing and scissor use. She does have occupational therapy  sessions. Her gross motor skills though are superb. We have a video of her making an impressive amount of foul shots when she was just 3. We were gratified to learn that her cognitive skills are right in the middle of the class.  She is making friends easily and for the most part, has good social skills.We also worried about her impulsivity. Lack of maturity or AHDH? Probably the former. The teacher gave the example of early in the year, Maya would go around knocking down towers that the boys had made without regard to their feelings. She didn't think Maya did it to be mean, just that she was too immature to understand the consequences. This brought back a sad memory. I was much older than Maya when I was asked to leave a friend's house because I had knocked down a tower made by her younger brother with the mom's words ringing in my head

 

What is wrong with you!!!?!

 

What indeed. Intrinsically bad? Raised by wolves?

 

It is still warm and pretty out. A bike ride yesterday and a long run today. Today I help take care of my friend who had a stem cell transplant. It will be the first time I have seen her since she went into the hospital almost 7 weeks ago. The other day, she thought she had host versus graft disease but it turned out to be an allergy to one of her medications. I guess it is a good sign that she can develop an allergy as her immune system was knocked out. She has been able to grow white blood cells but lymphocytes such as B and T cells take a year to reach the proper number. She is vulnerable to fungal infections. All the antigens developed from childhood vaccinations are gone. They will be replaced as her immune system grows in.