Help me tell a story. - A Speech Card Set Activity

I had 15 cards left over from my Initial /s/ card set after making some top-bottom puzzles yesterday. I was trying to think of an activity to do with the remaining cards.

I decided to try to come up with a story to tell about the cards. I told the story and paused to let Ava fill in the words prompted by the appropriate cards during the storytelling. The story is pretty silly, but it works fairly well given it was just made up to include 15 random initial /s/ words.

Here are the words I was trying to include: suck, seed, saw, soup, soap, sock, sick, seek, seal, sack, soil, side, sell, sub, and same.

Here is the story I used. It isn't exactly great fiction, but it includes all the words and Ava thought making up a story was fun. I thought of the story ahead of time and put the cards in the order they would appear in the story. Then, I just told the story off the top of my head as prompted by the cards.

Mommy was trying to suck some juice out of her juice box. It was all empty though. She decided to make some more from this watermelon. First she had to take out this seed and all the others. She was having some trouble so she cut it with a saw. Then she made her juice and drank all of it. When she was done she was still hungry so she decided to eat some soup. Her hands were all sticky from the watermelon, so first she had to wash her hands with some soap. Mommy didn't have a towel, so she dried her hands on a sock. How silly! Then she ate her soup. After she finished all her soup, she felt a little sick so she laid down and took a nap. After her nap she decided to go for a walk. While she was on her walk she saw some children playing hide and seek. She walked by the zoo and saw a mama seal and a baby seal. She saw a sack full of soil that had fallen on its side. All the soil fell out and made a big mess. Then mommy saw a man trying to sell a hot dog and realized that all that walking had made her hungry so she bought one and ate it. Next she walked by the lake and was surprised to see a sub. Finally, mommy decided it was time to go home. She was thirsty, so she went back to the same table to drink some more juice. The end.

Ava enjoyed the story and being able to help out by adding words to my story. I'd pretend that I had forgotten the next part of the story and she was helping me by telling me the word on the card.

Again, this isn't the most intense type of articulation drill, but taking five minutes out of a session to do this type of activity works on language skills, and teaches a story that you can use later to work on generalization to the phrase or sentence level. You could do this type of activity with any of the card sets.

Card Set Game: Top-Bottom Puzzles

Usually I just do drill with Ava. She tolerates it fairly well if I bribe her with a treat (I use the Gerber Graduates Yogurt Melts so I don't even feel guilty). I give her one treat for every set (15-30 repetitions or so) and two treats when we're all done.

For variety, I decided to try the top-bottom puzzle idea from the card set game and activity ideas list I posted a while back.

I printed a fresh copy of the fronts of my Initial /s/ set. First I cut them out using a paper cutter. Then I chose 15 out of the 30 cards that I thought would divide well into top and bottom halves and cut those in half. (I'll save the other half of the cards for a different game another time.)

I shuffled the half-cards and started setting them out on the table. I separated the tops from the bottoms to make it a little easier this first time. Every time Ava saw a match, she said the word and set the match aside.

She really enjoyed the activity. I thought it was fun, but the actual speech practice was much less intense than our usual therapy session. It sounds terrible to admit that I prefer drill, but speech therapy for motor planning problems needs to be heavy on repetitions. The child cannot automatize motor sequences without actually talking, and talking a lot.

Using a game instead of drill significantly reduced our number of repetitions. Perhaps a compromise would be to do drill for the first 2/3 of a session, and bring a game out at the end of the session for extra motivation when the child is getting fatigued.

Lowe's Build and Grow Kits

My uncle is a garage sale person. As he is a wonderful man, he keeps my children in mind as he searches for great deals. For Christmas he gave Michael a bunch of Lowe's Build and Grow kits he had picked up for a quarter each. I am officially telling him that the the gift is amazing. Thank you!

The kits are simple. They are wooden pieces with pre-drilled holes and nails. There are instruction sheets and stickers to decorate the finished product. Some examples are fire truck, helicopter, race car, pirate ship, and monster truck.

Michael, Ava, and I assembled our first kit last week. I just grabbed one at random and our first project was the monster truck. Here's a picture of the kit. They sell for about $9 at Lowes.

We all had fun assembling the truck with hammer and nails. Ava didn't have enough strength and fine motor control to hammer in the nails with her left hand so her job was to take the nail and push it down as far as possible into the predrilled hole by hand. Michael would follow up by hammering the nail down as much as he could and I finished off each nail.

I was pretty impressed with the way the kit went together. The pieces were well made and everything fit together well. The final product was sturdy and has held up to some pretty enthusiastic play.

After the monster truck was mostly assembled, but before we put on the stickers I suggested painting it. The children enthusiastically agreed. Ava painted the wheels black while Michael painted the truck red. We put on two - three coats and then let it dry overnight. Now we were painting it with washable tempera paint and I was a little concerned that it would rub off with sweaty hands so I finished it off with a coat of mod podge. Then we applied put the wheels on the truck with the last two nails and applied the decals.

Here's the final product. The children were delighted and Michael and Ava showed it off to every new guest to arrive in the house for days. Michael took it to his room to play with at every naptime and bedtime for days. I felt we got well more than $9 value out of the activity and the toy we got as a final result.