A little snapshot

The scene: the kitchen in the S. family home. About 2:30 pm on a hot afternoon.

The characters: Mom and Oliver are sitting at the table. Oliver is naked, having just returned from the river with Poppi and the other boys, and he is eating cold pizza.

Oliver finishes eating the pizza and heads over to the back door, hesitating for a moment before opening it. Once the door is open he looks over to his mother, probably knowing what she will say.

Mom: "Oliver, you need to put some pants on before you go outside."

Oliver looks out the door.

Mom: "I think I see some behind you."

Oliver turns and looks at the ground of the laundry room.

Mom: "I think they are on the shelf with the clean clothes."

Olive shifts his gaze from the floor to the shelf, scans the items and chooses a pair of shorts from the middle of the stack. He puts on the shorts and mom tells him what a great job he did finding his pants among all those other clothes.

******
Just an everyday moment, right? Well, maybe in other houses. There was a time, not long ago, when Oliver's receptive language would not have been good enough to decipher what I was saying. Getting clothes from the shelf in the laundry room is not a common task for him. In fact, the shelf folds out and normally it is tucked away out of sight. And on top of it, Oliver actually scanned the shelf for a pair of pants --- all the clothes were folded but they were not sorted, so he really had to study the pile to find what he was looking for. Our RDI objective for the moment is to help Oliver develop a studying response when presented with an uncertainty -- that he will really try to figure things out for himself. I guess its working.