The Weekly Review: Week 52

Week 52. Wow. A whole year of weekly reviews. Well, let's hop to it.

SLP Resource of the Week

Jenae at Icanteachmychild.com did a post on making duplo puzzles. You could definitely take my articulation picture cards and trim them to fit onto two rectangular duplos. Then cut the card in half and tape them to the sides of the duplos. Voila. Articulation duplo puzzles. You could easily use this for simple word building, matching upper and lowercase letters, matching mama to baby animals or any number of other matching activities.

When Michael is ready for some more independent practice with his /s/ I'm thinking of taking some of his duplos and slapping the initial /s/ cards on them and tossing them into their own bin and letting him discover them on his own. Hopefully he'll say the words as he fits the puzzles together.

Ava this Week

Ava loves her new "big girl" speech class. I guess she was ready to graduate from early intervention after all. She has speech twice a week for 45 minutes. Her sessions are right after preschool. Yesterday morning she begged me to take her to speech first and then school second. I had to explain to her that it just didn't work that way. I'm happy to see her excited about going though.

Weekly Michael

When Michael came down from naptime yesterday he found me reading in my glider. He crawled into my lap and snuggled under my arm resting his head on my chest. He told me that he dreamed there were red dot lights in the sky. As he reached up to touch each one with his finger, they burst into fireworks. It is interesting to note that I'm pretty sure he didn't actually sleep yesterday during nap time. He was either telling me about a daydream or a dream he had overnight. I didn't call him on it though. I just enjoyed the cuddle and story.

Ava's and Michael's Weekly Home Therapy Notes

/s/ and /l/ blends are chugging along well. Ava is doing a great job at getting both phonemes of the blend in with very little prompting. She's starting to habituate a rather long prolongation of the first consonant of the blend though. Pretty soon I'll have to start addressing that.

Michael is doing beautifully with the articulation rating scale. Using the scale helps him self correct to clear /s/ sounds for about 20-25 productions. Then he tanks. I think there is some actual oral-motor weakness there and he just fatigues to the point at which good productions just aren't possible any more. We'll just have to continue to practice and build up stamina.

Articulation Rating Scale - Picture Rubric

We are working on Michael's interdental /s/ production. His standard production is a visually distracting interdental production that sounds like a clear /s/. When asked to keep his tongue behind his teeth, he gets a lot of lateral air escape making the auditory result more like a /s/-/sh/ hybrid. When he is coached, is paying attention, and is not fatigued, he can occasionally produce a crystal clear /s/ with appropriate placement.

His production varies widely from repetition to repetition and I was having trouble giving him appropriate, useful feedback quickly and efficiently without disrupting the flow of practice and slowing us down significantly. Then I saw a post on The Learning Curve about an articulation rating scale she had made. I thought making something similar scaled down to the toddler/preschool level might help me give Michael more consistent feedback.

So I made this:

When we sat down to use it the first time I explained that this was going to help us with our /s/. I reminded him that making the /s/ with his tongue sticking out was incorrect and told him that if I saw him make it that way I'd point to the stop sign. If he made a beautiful clear /s/ sound (I demonstrated) I'd point to the smiley face with the fireworks. If the /s/ looked good, but sounded mushy (again, I demonstrated) I would point somewhere in between. He grasped the concept immediately and loved using the chart as a feedback tool. I was able to give him feedback instantly and quickly without needing a lot of words to explain what needed to be corrected. Every time I pointed to something below a 5 he was able to self-correct with no other cues needed (Until he got fatigued. At that point I just couldn't get any more clear /s/ sounds.).

The chart could be used in a similar fashion with any phoneme production that needs to be shaped. You could also use the rubric for just about anything with small children because the stop-sign to smiley face progression makes sense to little ones. You could use it to show children how well they cleaned up a room. You could use it to show a child how close his written "A" matched the one he was trying to copy. It's a really flexible visual scale.

As a funny side story, this is version 2 of the rubric. The first one I made had this:

instead of the stop sign. I was pretty pleased with my rubric and was showing it off to my husband. He thought the sobbing face was a bit harsh for little ones and suggested switching it for something else. I granted him the point and switched to the stop sign. Sometimes a second opinion is useful.

Any other ideas for how to use the scale?

Inspiration

My children inspire me. I don't mean that in a generic "I'm a better person." way. They inspire me to stretch a little and step outside of my comfort zone. Arts and crafts is a great example. Historically, I considered myself to be a decidedly non-artistic person. It doesn't come to me naturally. I don't have a good eye for color, design, or form. The only kinds of coloring I enjoyed as a child were color-by-number. As for crafts, I liked cross-titch. There was a pattern and I all I had to do was follow the pattern on a cloth grid.

Then I found myself staying at home with two young children. Partly from a desire to expand their horizons, and partly from pure self-defense (we all needed something to do) I began to do some simple arts and crafts with them. After coloring with crayons and cutting snowflakes with scissors I ran out of ideas. Through the brilliance and generosity of some talented bloggers (That Artist Woman and Art Projects for Kids for example) I have been inspired to do a wide variety of beautiful crafts with the children. I have learned a lot myself along the way and we all have fun together.

Again, historically, I am not great at keeping plants alive. I pretty much accidentally kill any houseplant that isn't a cactus or succulent in short order. The few plants I do manage to keep alive I tend to tire of caring for and give away. As for gardening, I'm not really outdoorsy. I also don't much like getting dirty. So, I have very little gardening experience.

However, I think I'd like to try some simple gardening with the children. I think they'd enjoy growing some vegetables and perhaps the experience would encourage them to consume a few. I have fond memories of eating cucumbers, tomatoes, and carrots from my dad's garden when I was little. The children would have the opportunity to participate in a long term project with delayed gratification. It would force us all to get outside regularly. I am interested in perhaps trying cucumbers, carrots, and bell peppers with the children. Preferably in pots. Can you grow vegetables in pots? Specifically, can you grow those vegetables in pots?

That's the problem. I'm an starting with zero experience and knowledge. Online research should get me started, but there's a long stretch from reading an article on the internet to eating home-grown vegetables. It's kind of fun to take a leap and try something new though. And the project will be a learning experience for all of us no matter how it turns out. Online research here I come.