Holiday Water Play

Well, the extended weekend over the Memorial Day holiday was wonderful. We enjoyed our visit with our son's godmother more than I can say. Often, on her visits, we go to many of the wonderful attractions here around St. Louis. This time the dual contributions of 95 degree weather combined with our new outdoor sprinkler park caused us to decide to just hang around the house enjoying the deck and spending quality time together.

We spent hours each day on the deck playing with the children in the water. Here are some additional ideas for fun with a water sprinkler system used as a homemade sprinkler park for kids.

A while back we noticed that the children loved playing with all the various PVC pipe connectors at home improvement stores. That gave me an idea for a simple cheap building toy for the kids. We bought some connectors and some pipe. My husband cut the pipe to several different lengths and the children have a blast building shapes, cubes, flags, and all sorts of free form creations with the pvc materials. I brought the bin out on the deck and encouraged the children to run the sprinkler hoses into the pipes to build fountains and sprinklers.

I also persuaded my husband to run an extra length of the sprinkler tubing down from the deck over to the children's playset to mount some sprinklers over the slide. He put in a joint so we can disconnect it and pull it back up onto the deck when he needs to mow the lawn. There's also a valve so the children can turn the water on and off at will to switch the slide from regular mode to water slide mode. I taught them how to pull a small kiddie pool over to the bottom of the slide and they went to it.

As it turns out, the smaller diameter sprinkler hosing works beautifully for filling up water balloons. We filled up a ton of water balloons and let the kids pop them by throwing them down onto the surface of the deck. It didn't occur to them to throw them at each other and I didn't feel the need to point that out as an option. They had a blast. We also turned several of them into baby water "piggies" and put them in the water table with soapy blue water (I called it their pigpen). The soap made for a nice sensory experience as well as making the baby piggies difficult to catch. Then we had to make mama and daddy piggies. Eventually the children convinced me to move the piggy families into the big pool. I colored the water with some washable tempera paint and the children had a blast taking care of the piggies. Some of the balloons were filled with water. Some were filled with air. Some were filled halfway with water so they could be shaken. Some we filled with water and a little soap so that bubbles were formed when the kids would shake the balloon. My husband even managed to get a small water balloon filled up inside a larger balloon so the kids could watch one bounce around inside another. Michael decided that one was a pregnant mama piggy with a baby insider her and Ava instantly demanded another for her piggy family. All in all, the water balloon piggies were a surprising success.

Holiday Weekend Hiatus

I've been doing daily posts for well over a year now. I enjoy the regular posting, however it is time for a brief hiatus. My cousin, who happens to be Michael's godmother, is in town for the extended holiday weekend. She comes every year to visit for the Memorial Day weekend and we all have a wonderful time. The children love her company and the extra attention. We usually go to the zoo, but the 100 degree temperatures predicted for the weekend may steer us towards indoor pursuits. Whatever we decide to do, it will be fun and relaxing. In the spirit of the holiday and visiting, I am going to skip writing posts until after the visit. I'll be back Wednesday.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend too!

The Weekly Review: Week 62

SLP Resource of the Week

Adventures in Speech Pathology has great speech picture cards. She has a card set for every sound including s, r, and l blends. Her card sets are more phonemically advanced than mine. Each sound's card set appears to be a one page .pdf with 12 color picture cards. The picture cards are 1-2 syllable words featuring the target sounds in initial, medial, or final position and the words include vocalic /r/ and blends. These cards are free and are great sets to move to when my phonemically simpler sets have been mastered or if you have a child who starts out ready to work at a level above the CV, VC, CVC level. These sets are great and are definitely worth adding to your collection. (And this blog has so many other wonderful materials for both speech and language activities. It would be well worth your time to check out the depth of material she provides.)

Ava, Michael, and the Weekly Project

Ever since my husband finished installing our very own deck level sprinkler park we've spent every evening on the deck. Once the kids have settled in and Ava's stopped insisting that Michael -not- get her wet, they've had a wonderful time. My husband and I sit way on the other side of the deck on the porch swing and just enjoy watching them play. It's been a perfect series of summer evenings.

Ava's and Michael's Weekly Home Therapy Notes

Ava's been working her way through all of her /s/-blends mixed together rather than sorted out. We're also working on /k/ in initial, medial, and final position and /sk/ blends (not mixed in with the rest). She's doing so well. When I think back to all of the variety of cues and scaffolding I needed to do to get a successful blend at the beginning and how exhausted she was after trying just 5-10 words I am amazed that she can zip through 75 in a session with very little cueing now.

Michael is working on /s/ and /f/ in all positions mixed together at the sentence level. He does best with picture cues and I've been trying to figure out a way to give him a wide variety of sentences with picture prompts. I think the flipbook format is going to be the way to go. I made up a test version with initial /s/, but next I'm going to just mix together all of my initial and final /f/ and /s/ cards into one big flipbook.

Weekly Homeschooling

Very little homeschooling went on this week. My husband had the week off in between his old job and the new one he'll start after the holiday and every day has been full to bursting with special projects. We've enjoyed our week together and we'll pick up the homeschooling next week.