Tuesday 12 August 2014

The water table: Early Speech & Language Development


Speech/Language Areas You Can Target While Playing With the Water/Sand Table

You can target just about anything with a water table! Here are some ideas for you, depending on your child’s needs:
  • Imitation skills: Some little ones need to first work on imitation skills. One thing you can do is imitate your child’s actions, vocalizations and/or words while he plays. Imitate something he does/says and then wait. You can learn more about building imitation skills in my post all about turn taking and imitation.
  • Turn Taking Skills: Practice taking turns with toys to help teach the import skill of turn taking, which is vital to speech, language & social development.
  • Animal sounds: Grab some small toy animals and throw them in the water/sand table! Model different animal sounds and provide your child with opportunities to imitate you and make the animals talk.
  • Articulation (speech sounds): You can use the water table to target sounds your child may be working on in speech therapy. For example, if your child is working on the /p/ /b/ and /m/ sounds, you can gather items that begin with those sounds and place them in the water/sand table for play! Say the words and encourage your child to repeat your words.
  • Body Part Identification (on self or toys)
  • Pronouns (I, me, you, he, she, they, hers, his, etc.)
  • Prepositions: You can use water toys, cars, toy animals (just about anything) to target preposition vocabulary while playing with the water/sand table.
  • Basic concepts: sizes, shapes, colors
  • Adjectives: other describing words
  • Verbs and verb use
  • Requesting: The water table is a great time to work on simple requesting skills. You can hold a desired toy just out of your child’s reach, look at him and WAIT. Model the language he needs if he needs a prompt/cue.
  • General pretend play skills
  • Following Simple Directions
  • Answering Simple Questions (who, what, yes/n0)

                                              





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Saturday 9 August 2014

Night walking among breastfeeding mothers and infants - Dr James McKenna



Conflict, congruence or both?


Keywords: infant night waking, maternal–infant conflict, mutual benefits, arousal functionality, maternal-induced infant arousals and breastfeeding



                                                     




http://cosleeping.nd.edu/assets/135560/emph_2014_mckenna_nightwaking_copy.pdf