What's been keeping me busy

So besides the norm...dishes, cooking, cleaning, diaper changes, bathing dirty little children, more cleaning, etc.  I have been busy making up some speech therapy games for Jedidiah.  These are not my ideas!  My brain doesn't work at the current moment :-)  So I take my ideas from people whose brains are working.  A lot of these are in the finishing stages.  Some are already done and we have been using.  We are hoping to buy one or two speech therapy books coming up soon.  One happens to be the book that his therapist uses.  However, being specialized books, they are not cheap (think 40-50 dollars per book!).  One of my ideas below came from a book that we had borrowed from one of his speech therapists in the past.  Again a 40 dollar book, but I made one up myself for much less. 



Can you guess what these are?  Anyone?  Look below if you can't figure it out:




They are paint chips from the local hardware store.  Read, "free".  Ha! The funny thing was that the girls kept asking me if we were allowed to take this many.  Well, there are no signs saying there was a limit.  I was hoping to go in and grab a bunch and head out unnoticed.  But something tells me that a woman with six children does not go unnoticed.  Not to mention I had a couple little ones excitedly (loudly) tell me about their finds!  Oh well.  So how are we going to use paint chips for Jed's speech you ask?  Keep reading.




Oops, one more picture of paint chips first.




Ah, there we go.  I got a pack of perforated letters, in the scrapbook section at Walmart, to add to the cards.  I was hoping to get the fancy colorful ones, but they didn't have any.  Oh well.  I wasn't about to travel way out of my way to the arts and craft store for some. These will have to do.  So these cards will be placed on here:




Here they are on the foam board. 



One set of the above paint chips were all textured.  Before I went in the store to grab my stash, I thought about getting some fine sand paper to make some letters for Jed to trace with his fingers.  It is important for him to learn all of this through as many senses as possible.  I was worried though that the sand paper might be too much texture for him to deal with.  But these textured paint cards are perfect, the texture without the scratch. 




Those ABCs will be put on paint chip cards as well (just got that done actually).  He can then trace them with his finger and say the sounds at the same time.  Then he can match them to the ABCs on the foam board.  Many children with apraxia have difficulty in reading and writing.  At first I was a bit concerned about this, but then realized that one of the reasons that 'they' are concerned for the children being behind has more to do with these children being in the school system.  So now I am not concerned anymore.  But I still realize that Jed may need more help than our other children with reading and writing and I am hoping with these added games we can give him a good start.




These are the hand motions that go along with the sounds for the letters. This came from his therapist. It is important that we use the same motions at home as he does in therapy.  I have to say at first I was skeptical that these hand motions were really going to help in any way, but they DO!  I'm not sure if it just gets him to focus on what he is supposed to be saying, or what, but when he keeps omitting a sound adding in the hand cue helps him get it out.




These big foam letters will be glued to wooden dowels.  I plan on using them to in many ways.  One being sticking them in the ground outside and asking him to find the 'b' sound. Then he would have to run around to find it.  Getting in some gross motor along with the speech.




These are some of the other games I have done.  One is a turtle in a pond game. He has to match the turtles with the same vowel sound.  The other is a paper doll game. We can work on some of the words he has been working on in speech (off, on, his, hers, names of clothing etc.).  The sheets at the top are his word cards from his therapist.



This one is hard to make out.  They are used with the book, "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See?"  I don't actually have the book, but we use the words, which just repeat for each page.  I also added in photos of all of us in our family since Jedidiah has a hard time saying our names.




This is a simplified version of "Going on a Bear Hunt".  With each page there are sound effects that you are to make, that I thought Jed would have a lot of fun with.




And last is the word flip book that I am making.  There are three of each card.  With apraxia children have a hard time with sequencing.  So you first start with the first set of cards.  Saying 'bee', 'bye'. 'bow', etc.  The beginning letters are the first letters that they say to start with as they are the easiest for kids with apraxia to say.  Then after they master being able to say the first set of cards, you add in the second set.  First starting with 'bee', 'bee'.  Then you work on two different cards, 'bee', 'bow'.  Then as they progress you add in the third set.




Here would be an example of using all three decks of cards.  The beginning sounds are 'b','d', 'm', 'n', 't', 'h' and maybe one or two more that I can't think of right now.

Phew, that's a lot of paper and laminating being used!  So that is what I have been up to in my *free* time. 



Here are two cute pictures of the boys taken pretty recently.  Feeling ill I've not been using my camera much at all.  Unfortunately for Jed the camera or his positioning makes it look like he's pretty filled out, but that is not the case.  Although with the discovery of being able to make our own custard ice cream that might change!!  I haven't made homemade ice cream in a couple of years.  We pulled out our ice cream maker and I finally got around to making some.  It's easy to make, but you have to let the custard cool before freezing it.  I would always be ready to make it come evening, not giving us the time to make it up.  I wasn't sure how it would turn out, but my oh, my it tasted just like our favorite ice cream store's custard.  It was divine.  And Jed thought so as well and wanted to eat more and more and more! 



This has been the boys favorite hide out, in our entertainment center.  They pull up a chair to get up in there and take turns closing the doors on themselves.  Too funny. 

Ok, off to work I go.  Well not really.  We have lunch then we plan on heading out to the children's museum, which we haven't been to since we got our membership!  With a high 90 degree day, what better way to spend the hot afternoon (not that we aren't living in AC luxury anyways, but still, too hot to be outside).  Then I am hoping to get some of the items off my 'to-do list' tackled.  We'll see though. Right now I am having good days and bad days.  Or good mornings and bad afternoons, and I can never tell which it will be until the end of the day :-)  Soon, very soon I should be past the bad days altogether and I *can't wait*!!!  Have a blessed day.