Science on the Light Box: Oil and Colored Water

Light Box Science: Oil and Colored Water

I grabbed one light box and the translucent tray to go on top. I also got out some cooking oil, food coloring, and four 2 oz squeeze bottles filled about halfway with water and gathered the children around the light box on the kitchen floor.

I asked them what happens when you mix food coloring with water. They replied that the water gets colored. "True," I said. "So, water and food coloring mix well together?" They agreed. We then colored each of the four bottles a different color.

Then I poured enough oil into the tray to completely cover the bottom and let them touch and explore the texture of the oil. After a few minutes I asked them what they thought would happen when we put the colored water in the oil. They guessed that the oil would "get colored." I said said, "Let's see." I put a few drops in and we talked about how water and oil don't mix well and so the droplets of water stay suspended in the oil. Then I just let them play. They had so much fun.

They were tentative at first, getting the feel for the squeeze bottles (it was the first time we used them) but soon the tray began to fill with tiny droplets of colored water. It was quite pretty.

They discovered they could make their dots bigger by putting several drops in the same place and even blend colors by using two or more colors in the same dot.

We found we could make two dots side by side that were "friends" until one inevitably got too pushy and absorbed the other. That was a very cool effect and the kids reproduced it many times.

Finally, before cleaning up, I let them get their hands back in. Ava just enjoyed the sensory experience. Michael noticed he could disturb all the big dots and make them into itty bitty tiny ones and enjoyed destroying every big dot he could find.

Cleanup was as easy and rinsing the tray out and then using dishwashing liquid to get the oil residue out of the tray so it would be ready for the next experiment.

Light Table Fingerpainting and Prints

In honor of all the people stopping by from ohdeedoh.com to check out how we made our homemade light boxes, I'm doing a post about another activity we did on our boxes.

Light Table Fingerpainting and Prints

Our light boxes are made from plastic storage bins, so we can get messy on them without worrying about damaging them at all so we didn't need to start by protecting the table. I began by filling an ice cube tray with blue, yellow, red liquid tempera paints. Then we mixed green, purple, and orange as well. At that point I sat back and watched the kids explore finger painting on the light boxes. They began conservatively with one finger and small dots and smears. They worked up to multi-finger rainbows and two-handed smearing of the entire surface.

Then, to continue their interest in the project I taught them how to make prints by pressing pieces of white tagboard onto the light table and then peeling them back up. They loved it. They explored different color combinations and patterns and compared the results before deciding on their next experiment.

We didn't stop until we ran out of time and the kitchen was pretty much a disaster. However, as messy as it looked, the paint rinsed right off of the lids of the bins and out of the ice cube tray in about 5 minutes. Then I let everything dry and picked it all up at once. So the cleanup didn't take long at all.

As a side note, I have succeeded in getting Ava so used to painting that she now doesn't hesitate to dive into paint with her fingers as long as she has a towel nearby to frequently wipe her fingers with. Big sensory/OT success there.

You might also be interested in the following posts:

More Light Table Activities

Homemade Light Boxes

Salt Art

Busy Book / Quiet Book Chalkboard

More Light Table Activities

Light Table Sand Art

We took a shallow translucent box and sprinkled some colored sand (of the type used to fill sand art bottles)on the bottom. We placed that box on one of our homemade light boxes. It was beautiful. Then we used our fingers to draw in the sand. The children loved it. They played over half an hour making designs on their own. We tried two different colors.

When they tired a bit of playing on their own I decided on a whim to use it to illustrate a story. I told the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. When we talked about the three bowls of porridge I made a table and one small bowl in the sand, one medium one, and one large one. I did the same for the three chairs and the three beds. The children loved it! Then I attempted a modified version of Hansel and Gretel and we made a trail of breadcrumbs through the sand forest. It was a nice language arts extension activity for the sand art on the light table.

Light Table Silly Spheres

I'm not sure what to call these. We got ours from a teacher supply store and they were called Slippery Spheres (I think). I called them silly spheres with the children. I think they are the same thing you can buy at craft stores that some people use to fill vases. Ours were tiny little plastic beads that absorb water until they are something like 100 times their original size. I got them because I thought they would work well with the light table and they would be a good sensory experience for Ava.

Eventually I want to work up to making a lot of them and having the children actually submerge their hands in them, but I started slow. This first time we just took a few of each color and watched to see what would happen to them if we put them in water. Once they were finished growing they were cool and wet and squishy. They bounced if dropped onto the light box. The kids would let them "swim" in their cups and then dig them out with their fingers and play with them on the light table for a while before returning them to their cups to swim some more. Michael liked to pretend that they were alive and tiny creatures he was taking care of. Ava accidentally squeezed one too hard and squished it. We threw that one away.

Supposedly you can leave them out to dry and they will return to their original state for you to use again in the future. 8 hours later, ours are only a little smaller. I'm beginning to wonder if that part is actually true. Even if not, it was still a great activity and I'm looking forward to revisiting it with a greater quantity of the silly spheres next time.

Solo

For the first time since the children were born my husband has to go on a business trip. I have two nights and three days of solo parenting to look forward to.

Two years ago I would have faced this situation with panic. One year ago I would have experienced extreme anxiety. Even six months ago I would have been nervous. Under all of those circumstances I would have lined up help in the form of grandparents.

Now I'm anxiety-free. The kids are so much easier at 2 1/2 and almost 4 than they were at younger ages. Barring any oven fires (knock on wood), we'll be fine. Sleeping by myself in an empty bed will be stranger than the solo parenting. It feels good to be comfortable going solo.

______________


Happy Halloween everyone!

Adulthood Independent of Parenthood

Last night my husband and I attended the wedding of a good friend. It was a storybook wedding. The sun set during the outdoor ceremony on a perfect crisp fall day. The bride pulled up in a horse and carriage. Everyone was beautiful and everything went perfectly. I felt honored to be invited to help celebrate such an important event in her life.

I put on a dress I hadn't worn since before Michael was born. My husband wore a suit and tie. My parents generously offered to keep both children overnight. We went out. We watched a beautiful ceremony, had a nice dinner, and talked with adults all evening. We felt very connected as a couple.

It has been a long time since I spent an evening out with my husband in a social setting that had absolutely nothing to do with parenting. I love my children. I love being their parent. It is a privilege. However, it was really nice to reconnect a little with what it felt like to just be us as an adult couple separate from the now ever-present parenting responsibilities. We'll have to try to go there more often.

Inconvenience

I am basically a people pleaser by nature. It just clicked with me in childhood like a baby duckling imprints on its mother. We follow rules. That's a fundamental truth. We try to make the people around us happy. Another fundamental truth. Being an inconvenience or annoyance to others is to be avoided at all costs.

As an adult I realize that this simply isn't possible at all times. I know that. I know it isn't healthy or possible to feel a compulsive need to keep everyone around me happy all the time. You'd think raising two under two would have beaten that out of me, but dealing with children is somehow exempt from all of the above.

Then it turned out that Ava needs extra help. In order to get her the help she needs I have to be her advocate, translator, chauffeur, personal assistant, and liaison in addition to raising her to be an intelligent, caring, responsible adult who knows, without question, that she is loved. In order to be this advocate for her I have to do things I find uncomfortable.

Specifically, I am asking her preschool office staff and teachers to make some accommodations for her. She has been receiving speech at school. Her teacher has been wonderful about it. She even helped us get permission from some of the other parents in the room to participate so that her therapist can facilitate her communication in a small group. Overall, the school has been wonderful too, even providing a room for them to work in.

Ava's third birthday is on the horizon and the school district is preparing to evaluate her in December. They've called the school to set up an appointment to do an official classroom observation as part of that evaluation.

Last week her occupational therapist expressed a desire to observe her in the classroom during play and during her lunch at school. She and I tentatively set that up for next Tuesday. I mentioned that to the preschool director as I was heading to pick Ava up from her classroom and I got a distinctly chilly vibe. She said it was fine, of course, but the subtext was clear [enough is enough].

It was just a little thing. It was, perhaps, 30 seconds of my day. She didn't even say anything, it was just a negative, inconvenienced vibe. And yet I'm still thinking about it. It's because I want to please. I don't want to be that parent who is a nuisance.

I need to get over it. I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg. This journey with Ava will consist of many more moments when I have to push, or inconvenience someone. It's just the nature of this particular beast.

The Weekly Review: Week 32

Blog Post with an Outstanding Description

This week Amalah wrote about a situation at her son's school where several parents of children with special needs felt they needed to advocate for their children. This post contains an outstanding description of the variety of personalities and responses that make up that population of parents and how they all ended up in the same place anyway.

Weekly Blog Post that Made Me Want to Cook:

Weelicious.com featured a crockpot vegetable lasagna recipe a while ago. I liked the idea so much I decided to try it. It was so easy and turned out really well. And, all four members of the family liked it. That's a major success around here.

Weekly Entertaining OT Activity:

This week our OT arrived with three things. She brought powdered sugar, peanut butter, and honey. We didn't measure anything, so I can't give you an exact recipe. We put several tablespoons of peanut butter in a large bowl (for each child) and let them taste the peanut butter with their fingers for a while. Yummy and good sensory experience rolled into one. Then we put some honey (a tablespoon or two?) in another spot on the bottom of the bowl and tasted that with our fingers too. We talked about how the peanut butter and the honey tasted and felt different from each other. Finally we sprinkled powdered sugar (lots) on top of both and let the children taste that too. Then we encouraged them to pat the sugar down into the honey and peanut butter using their hands. Patting turned into pushing. Pushing turned into stirring with a finger. Stirring with one finger turned into mixing enthusiastically with both hands (tasting frequently all the while). Eventually, with much stirring and adding lots of powdered sugar the mixture reached a play-doh like consistency. We made peanut butter play-doh. Lots of fun, yummy, and a great sensory experience. The end.

The Weekly Michael

Michael's continued theme is exploring destruction. Please tell me this is a phase. This week he deliberately pulled up his floor vent and stuffed random objects inside (multiple times). He popped Ava's balloon - with his teeth. He pulled a well attached canvas wall print off his wall and then pulled the 3M wall hangers off both the wall and the picture as well. He attempted to cut a hole in the side of a bottle of glue with his scissors (right in front of me). I have actually told him that he needs to stop and think about whether his actions will destroy or harm something before doing it and decide to stop if the answer is yes. The next time he destroyed something he just informed me that he had forgotten to think.

Ava this Week:

Baby Kitty has been replaced. At the store the other day Ava passed by a bin of $4 baby dolls. She found a pink one with a kitty embroidered on its bib and a pacifier in its mouth. She cradled that doll in her arms for at least half an hour before we left and asked so nicely if she could take it home. I couldn't resist. Certainly not for four dollars. Mama Kitty and Baby Kitty are still in bed with her, but Bitty Baby (as we call her because she's small) takes the place of honor tucked in Ava's arm as she falls asleep.

Salt Art

These turned out beautifully.

1. First you take watercolor paper and let the children drizzle glue all over the paper.
   
   
   
   
2. Then you have them sprinkle salt over the glue until the glue is completely covered with salt.
   
   
3. Count to 20 or sing the ABC song to let the glue set a bit and then shake off excess salt.
4. We let ours dry for a couple of days but I've read that you can just go ahead and move to the next step immediately if you like.
5. Put liquid watercolors in an ice cube tray. We have red, yellow, and blue. We used those to also make orange, green, and purple. (You could also use water colored with food coloring.) Put one eyedropper in each spot.
   
   
6. Let the children drop the watercolors onto the salt trails using the eyedroppers. The salt trails will wick away the paint. They loved this and it really encourages fine motor control because it works best if they only dispense one drop at a time.
   
   
7. Admire end result and place somewhere to dry.
   
   
8. [Optional]When children want to continue using eyedroppers and watercolors provide additional paper and show them how they can use the eyedroppers as tools to make lines from the drops of paint.
   
   

Speech Therapy Progress - So Slow

I realized that I haven't done a speech therapy progress update in almost 5 months. I can't believe that much time has passed. I've been doing fewer progress updates because there is less progress to report.

Last time I wrote a progress update I said that we were working on final consonants and that she was using /p/ and /t/ spontaneously about 30% of the time and we had pretty much no other final consonants. Now Ava is using final /p/ and /t/ spontaneously at least 60% of the time in phrases and sentences. She's also using or approximating most of the other early emerging consonants spontaneously at least 30-50% of the time. She can imitate final /s/ and /sh/ as well, but is not using those spontaneously.

We still don't have /k/ reliably. I'd say I've seen relatively little movement on this phoneme in 5 months time. Even in direct imitation with multiple cues she will substitute /t/ for /k/ at least 3/5 times. I am frustrated with the complete lack of progress on learning a velar sound.

Right now I feel like I understand Ava at least 90% of the time in context and at least 50% of the time if I have no context. I think she is significantly less intelligible to strangers. She is speaking regularly in 3-7 word sentences, but most of those are word approximations.

She has /p, b, t, d, m, n, h, f, j, w, s, sh, ng, and vocalic /r/ in her phonemic inventory.

I feel like her language growth has been phenomenal over the past few months. Sentence length and complexity, expressive vocabulary, and morpheme use has all improved significantly (as you would expect for a child of her age).

Speech progress has slowed and is becoming difficult to track. We have shifted out of the stage where we see rapid progress from beginning therapy. Now I am beginning to see that the remaining errors are significantly more stubborn and progress will be measured in small increments rather than leaps. It is disappointing, but not unexpected.

I know slow progress is much more typical of apraxia and motor planning problems than fast or even steady progress. It's just that when things moved so quickly at first I got my hopes up. I was hoping that she would be the exception rather than the rule. Why is there always another reality check just around the corner?

Apraxia Therapy Materials: Turn & Talk Early Sounds

Therapy Materials Review: Turn & Talk Early Sounds - Fun Practice with P, B, M, T, D, and N in Initial, Medial, and Final Positions of Words

This is a review of Turn & Talk Early Sounds. This easel book is published by Super Duper Publications. The book contains 600 illustrated words addressing the early emerging phonemes (p, b, m, t, d, n) in initial, medial, and final positions of one and two syllable words.

Target Audience

The publishers state that the target audience for the Turn & Talk Early Sounds book will be children from PreK-3rd grade. The pictures on the cards are appealing to children. I could see using selected sections with younger children who need practice on early emerging sounds as well.

Description of Turn & Talk Early Sounds

This product is a 11 inch by 4.5 inch spiral bound book with hard covers. The book has a built in easel so you can stand it upright. Inside you'll find an introductory section describing the contents of the book and giving tips for eliciting correct production of the target sounds. This section also includes a blank card you can use to write in the sounds in isolation or in VC or CV syllables with a dry erase marker if you want to work on the sounds at that level.

Phonemic Breakdown

The book has a tabbed section for each of the six phonemes: P, B, M, T, D, N.

Each section includes 100 words divided as follows:

• 20 Initial One-Syllable
• 20 Initial Two-Syllable
• 20 Medial Two-Syllable
• 20 Final One-Syllable
• 20 Final Two-Syllable

How to Use the Turn & Talk Early Sounds book

This book is going to be most appropriate for intense drill on these phonemes. Choose the section that addresses your goals and objectives for a child and use that section to drill. The pictures are fairly engaging, but you will probably need some motivational tool such as a turn at a game, sticker, or token.

Pros and Cons of the Turn & Talk Early Sounds book

• Pros:
• The Turn & Talk Early Sounds book is compact and easy to carry around.
• AT 100 words per phoneme, the Turn & Talk Early Sounds book includes a pretty good number of stimuli per phoneme.
• The five picture spread format allows you to do many repetitions easily. This is a great format for approaching therapy with apraxic children from a motor planning standpoint.
  
• The book is sturdy and has a built in easel.
• The illustrations are well done and appealing to children at a wide variety of ages.
• Cons:
• Although there are 100 words per phoneme, there are only 20 one syllable initial and 20 one syllable final pictures for each phoneme. Most of those 20 one syllable words are fairly complex including later emerging phonemes, vocalic /r/ sounds, and even blends. Therefore, if you are working with a child with a severe speech delay you may find this book to include stimuli that is mostly too difficult. My free articulation picture cards target these same phonemes at a simpler motor planning level, so if you need simpler look there.
• This book will work best for children needing a simple articulation approach to speech remediation. Most children with simple articulation errors are making errors with later emerging phonemes. This book may not address the phonemes you need most.

Bottom Line:

The Turn & Talk Early Sounds book is a good purchase if you need stimuli that address these early emerging phonemes. Just think carefully about whether the stimuli included here are actually going to be too difficult given that often children who need drill on early emerging phonemes are severely delayed and may have difficulty producing many of these stimuli because of the other phonemes included in the target words.

You might also be interested in the following products:

Apraxia Therapy Materials: Free Speech Therapy Articulation Cards

Apraxia Therapy Materials: Webber Jumbo Articulation Drill Book

Apraxia Therapy Materials: Word Flips

Apraxia Therapy Materials: Phrase Flips

Making and Painting a Textured Surface

This started out as a great OT activity. Take toilet paper and let the children rip it into little bits and fill a bowl with it. They absolutely loved that part.

Then you add glue. Lots of glue. I didn't measure, but I used at least 8 oz for the three bowls. Ask the children to mix the glue with the toilet paper (with their hands) until it turns to sticky mush. Listen to screaming and crying protests and end up doing much of the mixing yourself. (Or at least, that's how it went at our house.)

[I forgot to take a picture of what the glue/toilet paper mush looked like. Sorry!]

Then persuade the children to take the mush from the bowl and put it on paper to dry creating textured paper before they run off to wash their hands. If you have children with no sensory issues, this has so much potential. I made a snowman. You could make a mountain and lake. You could make anything really. It's pretty cool.

Let it dry for a couple of days until you remember to get back to the project.

Let the children paint the newly textured paper. They loved this part. I filled an ice cube tray with six different colors of liquid tempera paints and gave them brushes and let them paint. We experimented with dabbing it on the textured areas and different types of brush strokes on the plain paper. They had a blast. We spent about 45 minutes painting the textured paper and then moving on to several other pieces of plain paper before they were done.

Here's how the painted textured ones turned out.

A couple of notes should you decide to try this activity yourself. You need lots of glue. And lots of toilet paper. We used about half a roll of toilet paper and ended up with relatively little final product.

Homemade Light Boxes

One of the things that is often incorporated into the activities featured on Play At Home Mom is a light table. I decided to make homemade light boxes for the kids (with my husband's help). They aren't quite finished, but they are functional.

First we bought two fairly small clear bins. We wanted them to each be able to play on their own and we liked the idea that they could even pull them into their laps if they wanted. We bought white spray paint (the kind designed to adhere to plastic) and spray painted the inside of the bin and some of the lid. We also bought battery powered florescent lights to put inside. I used some pattern paper I had gotten a while back from a fabric store and we use that to diffuse the light. Hopefully the pictures will make all of this clear.

So far, we have just played with translucent items on top of the box. Once they get bored with that, I'll start to introduce different art and sensory activities using the light box. So far we've used glass gems, mosaic shape tiles, translucent letters, and some translucent duplos on the box. The gems we sorted by color. The shapes can be sorted by color and shape. You can also use the shapes to make pictures. Two triangles make a diamond. Two squares make a rectangle. You can make a house or flower or anything else you can imagine. The translucent letters can just be sorted by color or letter or used to spell simple words. We didn't have enough translucent duplos to do much with, but they thought they looked really cool on the light box.

You might also be interested in the following posts:

More Light Table Activities

Salt Art

Busy Book / Quiet Book Chalkboard