ASQ Early Intervention Screening 2 months-6 years old

I just had lunch with Tricha who is one of my friends and former coworkers at Gretchen's House @ Little Oaks. She is going back to school for her masters and needed to interview a new mom for a paper she is writing. The paper had to do with new moms knowledge of early intervention screenings for infants and young children. She wanted to know if parents were aware that these types of screenings were available for free. Thanks to my background as an early childhood educator I did know about these screenings. I did not know how to access them outside of a school setting.

The screening is called ASQ. ASQ stands for Ages and Stages Questionnaire and can be used to asses children 2 months to 6 years of age. You can do an ASQ If you think your child might have a developmental delay or to see if they are developing on the right track. ASQ's are done on-line and the results are sent to a developmental specialist. You will be contacted with the results within 3 business days. This service is FREE if you live in Oakland, Macomb or Wayne county.  If the specialist determines that your child needs an intervention they will contact you and provide you with free services!  Make sure to fill out a new ASQ every couple of months as they become more detailed as the child ages. Early intervention is key!

To fill out an ASQ go to http://www.helpmegrow-mi.org

Baby Sign Language

Baby sign is my favorite! I learned about baby sign language when I worked at Little Oaks. We taught the infants in our care basic signs so they could communicate with caregivers and other children. We started off with one or two signs. Usually the first signs we taught were milk, more and eat. When teaching the sign you say the word, do the sign and then take the babies hands and have them do the sign. You follow this action with presenting your child with whatever object, person or event they signed for.

The first aim is for your child to make a connection between the sign and what it represents. Use certain signs before an event, enabling your child to anticipate it. It is best to sign when your child is making eye contact with the relevant object or event.  Repetition is important. Use every opportunity to sign. Your child will understand the sign before they are able to perform them. Try to be patient and have fun with it.

It's so amazing when they start catching on. Babies can learn to sign as early as 4 or 5 months. It's an awesome feeling to be able to communicate with your little one before they can talk. Sign language promotes early language and communication skills and improves brain development.

Here are some of the more popular signs you can do with your baby.

Encourage all of your babies care givers to do sign with your baby for consistency and more repetitions.

Jolene and I are just getting started on the milk sign.


All of the signs pictured above were taken from the children's book My First Signs. Illustrated by Annie Kubler.

Tummy Time

One thing I learned in school that always stuck with me is the way a babies brain works. Synapses occur in the brain regularly throughout life. An explosion of synapses can occur in the early years of life if nurtured. Every time your baby experiences something new like textures, smells, sounds etc. the brain creates new synapses. This is why I will try to incorporate a lot of sensory into everything I do with Jolene. Some may think it's pretty wacky but in reality it supports healthy brain development.

Tummy Time! We all know how important tummy time is with an infant. Now that babies everywhere are being put to sleep on their backs tummy time is as crucial as ever. While babies lay on their stomach they are building muscles in their core, neck and head area. Lots of little babies are not a fan of tummy time. Jolene isn't either but she's getting there. They say about 15 minutes of tummy time a day is sufficient. Break that up into 5 minute increments and your baby will get enough.

You can do tummy time in so many ways. Jolene's favorite way is laying on my chest when I lay on the floor or bed. She can look at my face and be comforted by the sound of my voice.

I went to the dollar store and got a whole bunch of random materials with different textures to make a tummy time board for Jolene. I got out the hot glue gun and went to work. This one has faux fur, marbles, an unraveled loofah, pipe cleaner with jingle bells, popsicle sticks and scratchy glitter foam. I also added pictures of me and my husband for her to look at. I covered 3 of the 5 senses; sight, sound and texture.

It's important to provide language for your baby while they experience different textures and use their senses. For example you can say "You're touching the marbles, they are shiny and bumpy. Do you hear that? Those are jingle bells". When they show emotion talk about that too. "You're looking at a picture of daddy, does that make you happy? I see you smiling." Or "I hear that you're crying, does too much tummy time make you sad?"

I also used some of my dollar store materials to make a gel bag. I filled a freezer zip lock bag with hair gel, glitter and random things I found like fake snow, Christmas erasers and giant snow flakes. We use the gel bag for tummy time. Making these are lots of fun because you can put so many different items in here. In the past I would laminate pictures of baby or their family members to put inside.

Not all tummy time has to be so complicated and involve trips to the dollar store. I threw this one together using wrapping paper scraps. The crinkling of the paper was new and just as entertaining to her as anything I could have bought in a store.

What things have you thrown together to make tummy time more interesting? I would love to hear everyone else's ideas too!

Being a stay at home mom.

I am Jolene's mom. Jolene is almost 7 weeks old and my first baby. In 2006 I began working at a child care center. What I thought was just a job to have a job ended up being life changing. During this time I was going to OCC and taking my prerequisites for nursing. In order to work at this particularly amazing daycare you had to be going to school for early childhood. I went to OCC for free so it wasn't a big deal to take an extra class in early childhood. My first class was with Betsy. I loved it! Not only could I relate my everyday interactions to what I was learning at school I was good at it too. I decided to switch my degree focus to early childhood. I went on to get my associates and then bachelors degree in early childhood. 




I worked at Little Oaks from 2006-2010 and it was the best job I ever had. My co-workers were amazing! The children and families were just as wonderful. They did this thing called Family groups. You would start in the infant room with a group of tiny babies and you would stay with the same group until they went to preschool, moving from room to room with them. It was fantastic. You really got a chance to bond with the families and form secure attachments with the children. I loved my family group! They were my babies! I was forced to quit in 2010 when an evil corporation came in and took over our company. It was awful, I was separated from my family group and coworkers and forced to start over at another job. 




Over the next 6 years I worked at a home daycare, a community preschool, at head start and then finally taught pre-k for lake orion school district. Lake Orion Pre-K was almost as awesome as Little Oaks. The only reason it didn't totally compare is because it wasn't infants and toddlers. I love the infant/toddler age. Preschool is pretty awesome too but nothing compares to the cute little innocent faces that don't know how to get sassy yet. 




So here I am working at my second awesome job teaching pre-k when I get pregnant. I never wanted to be a stay at home mom. I always dreamed that I would work at little oaks and bring my baby to work with me like all of the other moms did who I worked with. Now here I am with an awesome job and the opportunity to stay at home. It was a hard decision but I chose to stay at home so I could be my babies teacher. I want to do all of the fun and awesome things with her that I did with my babies back at little oaks. 




This is how we got here today. I am going to make a blog about all of the activities I do with Jolene. A lot of the things I do will be inspired by the high scope curriculum. I'll explain my love for that in another post. Basically, I will follow her interests and the things I do will be hands on and "process over product". I'm also a parent so I'm going to throw in some parent pleasers as well. I will do my best to explain my logic behind it all. All of my great activities and ideas so far (🙄) will have to wait until another post as my baby needs me now and my fingers are cramping up. I hope you all find it as interesting and enjoyable as my cousin Cindy, who suggested I put my ideas into a blog.