Are you superstitious?

I do not consider myself to be a superstitious person. I do not immediately think of seven years of bad luck when I see a broken mirror. I am not concerned about... (hmm, what is it?) something negative when someone walks under a ladder. I am not worried about Friday the 13th, black cats, or opening an umbrella in the house.

I do, however, compulsively knock on wood. Whenever I make a statement aloud, or even in my own mind, that acknowledges good fortune I immediately follow it with "knock on wood" and I physically knock gently on some nearby object (although, oddly enough, that object does not literally need to be made of wood to satisfy my compulsion). It isn't, really, that I logically think I need to knock on something to avoid negative consequences. It -is- something more than simple habit though.

I think that, subconsciously, it is a way of acknowledging that I recognize my good fortune and that I am grateful for it and do not take it for granted - only in shorthand. I have to make a deliberate and not insignificant effort to refrain from the motion under circumstances in which it would be inappropriate.

I was thinking about all of this when I recently found myself knocking on the dashboard of the car when having a conversation with the children. To date, they've never asked me why I'm randomly knocking on things in the middle of a conversation but at some point they will ask. I'm not sure how I will answer. I'm not sure it is a habit I wish to pass on.

Do you consider yourself superstitious? What superstitions do you believe in? How do you explain them to your children?

Mixed V Printable Speech Fishing Activity

Practice V in Initial and Final Position While Playing with Speech Fish

Click on the image to open it to full size and then right click to save it to your computer. Print the sheet with a program of your choice on cardstock for durability. You might even want to laminate these. Put a few heavy-duty staples in each fish or put paper clips on them to use them in a fishing game with a magnetic wand.

Children might also enjoy lining the fish up, pretending to feed the fish or feed the fish to another stuffed animal, sorting the fish by color, using the fish to make patterns, or tossing the fish into a pond (small bowl, bucket, or blue piece of paper).

You can practice the words in isolation, in pairs, in phrases, or in sentences. You can use the words with or without cues. Adapt the stimuli to the level your student needs to work at.

This worksheet is modeled after Speech Fish worksheets included in the Simple Vowels Speech Kit and the /S/- Blends Speech Kit.

Enjoy!

A Coat Closet Remodel

We have a teeny-tiny, oddly-shaped coat closet near our front door. Think a triangle that you can just barely stand in upright. It had a wire shelf with a bar for hanging coats about two feet long. The bar went from the front of the closet to the back (rather than horizontally, so that hangers and coats in the front would obscure the ones farther back making them inaccessible). The bottom of the closet was a foot-high pile of shoes - some of which my children hadn't been able to wear for at least two years.

I detested going in the closet. It was almost unusable. I hated digging in an old pile of dirty shoes for the one pair I needed. I started having the children put their coats on a nearby seat instead of in the closet and their shoes in the hall so I could find them quickly. This just contributed to clutter. Not an ideal solution.

I came up with an ideal solution. Tear it all out and have my husband install hook style coat racks on the walls of the closet at varying heights for shoes and coats. It wasn't supposed to take more than half an our to tear out the old stuff and stick in the new ones....

As usual I vastly underestimated. It took two hours just to sort through the years of stuff we had crammed in there. Then coat racks were prohibitively expensive. Who knew those things cost $30 each? So my husband bought individual hooks and boards at a home improvement store and made his own. That took... well... a long time. Several hours at least. And then there was something about finding studs that I didn't pay a lot of attention to. I was busy entertaining children.

So, it is only half done. We ran out of screws, and hooks, and boards. But this is what it looks like so far. I LOVE it. It makes me very happy. The children love it. We all actually enjoy hanging up our coats and shoes when we come in the house. Eventually the baskets for hats and mittens will be hanging on the wall instead of on the floor, but it a wonderful, small-child friendly solution to a coat closet. I highly recommend it.

(The picture just shows the bottom half of the closet, but the top has another row of similar hooks. There will be an additional row of shoe hooks on the left below the current row and right below the children's coats. The baskets for hats/scarves/mittens will go above the children's coat hooks on the right.)