*** On thursdays I will be posting what activity we did at home to reinforce therapy. I hope this gives you some good ideas and is helpful in integrating speech into your daily life!***
Every Tuesday and Thursday after my oldest is shuttled off to preschool Harrison and I head to speech Therapy. I enjoy our time together when we can focus on his development without distraction, and therapy is almost always fun for him. I always get such great ideas from his SLP by watching what they are doing, and later trying to do it at home. I have picked up a lot of ideas over the last few months, but I try to focus on repeating what we learned during that specific session once we arrive home on the very same day. I feel that this consistency helps to embed new concepts into Harrison's mind.
Today in speech Harrison and Melissa (SLP) played bubbles to focus on spatial concepts such as up, down, above, below. They also played kitchen with a baby doll, feeding the doll muffins they "cooked." This activity was focused on vocabulary building and ending consonants. (Right now at 2 1/2 Harrison is working on P,T, and K, so vocabulry such as eat, cook, help, fruit ect.) Before the session was over we were also able to drill on recognizing, pointing to and repeating words ending in T (eat, hat, boot, white, ant, bat, nut, hot). It was a busy 30 minutes, but he was focused and engaged the entire session! Not an easy feat for a two year old!
On the way home I generally make mental notes of what we worked on and try to decide what we can do at home. I had a few things to choose from but since I don't drill on therapy days and it was way to cold outside for bubbles, I settled on making real muffins. I try to remember if we introduced any new words and make sure to repeat them. Today I focused on the specific sounds we are practicing saying everything as I do it, "Lets cook(kkk)." We also took the opportunity to work on taking turns "M(mmmmm)ommy's going to stir now. And now it's Harrison's turn to stir." I repeat this with measuring, pouring. I try to closely follow Melissa's example which also helps train ME to integrate speech into our daily life .
The muffin making activity only took me about 45 minutes including cook time. Within that 45 minutes he learned how to use the language he is discovering during "pretend play" in the real world. I truly believe he has improved because these activities offer him opportunities to feel success outside of the speech office. It's a lot of fun, it feels special to him and his lesson gets reinforced. Besides what kid doesn't love an excuse to make muffins? Yum!
***I want to clarify that this is not related to "drill" time, but play therapy. Drill's at home are saved for days we do not have therapy so he will continue to enjoy our drill activities. Why? He may burn out from pushing too much drill time at home and then resist in therapy hampering his development. ***
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