The Weekly Review: Week 69

SLP Idea of the Week

I saw this fine motor activity post and thought it would make a fun reinforcer during articulation therapy for preschoolers. Gather a piece of styrofoam (or a large lump of playdough), several golf tees, several marbles, and your articulation stimuli. First let the child hammer the golf tees into the styrofoam (or playdough). Then have them balance the marbles on top of the golf tees. You get to work on articulation and improve fine motor skills at the same time all while keeping a young child completely engaged.

Ava this Week

Ava gave me one of those heart-stopping moments of terror this week. Here's what happened.

Ava has discovered clothes. I am not a clothes person. I have two pairs of jeans and 6-7 t-shirts and I simply rotate between what's clean. I am perfectly happy that way. Ava has this gorgeous chest-of-drawers full of little girl clothes because I have a good friend with a little girl two years older than Ava and we get her hand-me-downs.

Ava loves digging through her chest of drawers and pulling out something new to put on. She needs a stool to get into the top drawer and even then, she has to be on tippy toes to see into that drawer. One night I was getting her ready for bed and told her to go pick out a shirt to sleep in. I watched her drag her stool over and pull open the top drawer hanging onto its edge to try to peer inside. And then it happened.

The entire dresser began to tip. I watched it pull away from the wall and time slowed down. I said something, but I truly don't remember what. The dresser is heavy. It's a really massive piece of furniture. It was going to crush her. I wasn't going to get to it in time. I was sitting in a chair completely across the room. Just at that moment she lost her balance. I don't know if it was my panicked voice that startled her, or just coincidence. It was a wonderful happenstance though because when she lost her balance she also lost her grip on the drawer and the dresser thumped back against the wall. Another half an inch and it would have fallen the other way. Onto her.

Just thinking about it makes me sick. I have forbidden her to go into her drawers until we get one of those straps to childproof the thing and attach it to the wall. Perhaps in about seven or eight spots just to make me feel better.

Weekly Michael

Once a week my parents come over and we have a three-generation family dinner. It is a ton of fun and we all look forward to it. My dad has a joke he tells the kids regularly that they always laugh (and groan) at. He'll ask them, "What's worse than finding a bug in your piece of bread?" They'll respond, "What?" After a slight pause he delivers the punchline "Finding half a bug in your bread." At that point they giggle, groan, laugh, and complain, "Eww Grandpa!"

This week Grandpa told his joke again getting the usual laughs from the children. Several minutes later during a pause in the conversation Michael asked, "What's worse than finding half a bug in your piece of bread?" He had instantly captured the complete attention of all the adults at the table. We were wondering where exactly he was going with this. We dutifully asked, "What?" He delivered his punchline "Finding a quarter of a bug in your bread!" It doesn't sound funny typing it all out. Perhaps you had to be there. We all busted out laughing. It was hilarious. Michael's first joke and it was a punchline based on math.

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I have another Michael story this week. We were trying (I think ultimately, unsuccessfully) to make homemade rock candy. The activity gave us the opportunity to discuss concepts like dissolving, solutions, boiling, and super saturated solutions. I, however, forgot to refresh my memory on exactly what those concepts mean in detail and of course Michael called me on it. "How does the sugar dissolve into the water? Why does more dissolve when the water is hot? Why does even more dissolve when the water is boiling? What happens when the solution cools back down?" Darn it. I couldn't answer those questions. Perhaps it will be a good thing, a week from now, when the experiment fails and we have to try again. I'll study up on the answers to those questions before our redo.

Liquid Watercolor Activity: Contact Paper Resist

This time, I'll admit it. I was focused on product rather than process. I wanted the children to be really impressed with their creations and I knew ahead of time that if they turned out well I was going to display them. So, I did all the preparation ahead of time.

I used my cricut machine to cut the contact paper (if you do it that way, remember to R-L reverse the letters otherwise they'll be backwards when you go to stick them on). You could cut out letters and simple shapes by hand too.

I taped the watercolor paper down in some art trays to minimize mess and to try to prevent the buckling of the watercolor paper when the children got it soaking wet. Then I applied the contact paper designs and pressed them down well.

We used a wet-on-wet technique to paint (that just means get your watercolor paper wet before painting it with your liquid watercolors). So I started out by spraying the watercolor paper with a squirt bottle of water. I let them choose three related colors. I made one too so all three of us were painting at the same time.

They turned out beautifully and the children can't wait to hang their new nameplates in their rooms.

(This activity was inspired by this post.)

Liquid Watercolor Activity: Painting a Wooden Mosaic

One of the first projects we did with our new liquid watercolors was to paint a wooden mosaic. I prepared the mosaic ahead of time. I wanted the focus to be on the painting and so I streamlined a bit by having the mosaics ready. I made one for Michael and another for Ava.

I let each child choose three colors. Ava chose red, purple, and blue. Michael chose red, yellow, and orange. I opened those containers on their paint trays, gave them a paintbrush and water to clean it between colors, and let them paint.

Ava preferred a free-spirited approach to the project. She would saturate one piece and put dots on another. Then she did one long stripe across the entire page. She went back and added a second color to some of the wooden pieces she had already painted. And suddenly, she was done. It didn't bother her in the slightest that only half of her mosaic was painted.

Michael took a much more organized approach. He painted one column at a time and was never tempted to vary from that set pattern. He painted each wooden piece once and moved on. When the last piece was painted he was finished. He could not be persuaded to go back and try combining colors or adding dots.

I think I'll pull the mosaics out another day and see if they are interested in working on them again. My goal was for them to realize that the liquid watercolors are good for more than simply painting paper, and that goal was certainly achieved.