Fantastic Apps! - Learning to Read Phonics Apps by Emmy Chen

I absolutely love the iPad app 'Phonics Silly Sentences - Short Vowels, Flash Cards, Matching and Sentences.' I love the whole series made by Emmy Chen and it is so worth the $2.99 price!

My almost-five year old boy is still behind in his speech but I've started him in a reading program that I got for free from Funnix and I downloaded a bunch of free versions of different apps, of which the Silly Sentences series is by far my favorite. He knows the alphabet, letter sounds and so now I've started to teach him sight words and beginning phonics. So far he is doing super well - he's learned about ten sight words so far and is learning the concept of sounding out words. Don't get me wrong, he's not reading yet, but it's a promising, solid start!

The app was easy enough for my son to do by himself but I would not recommend that. Sitting and playing together, saying the sounds and words aloud with my son was really helpful. He loves matching the pictures to the words and sentences and it is making a connection between sentences and specific sentences which has been different than other books and apps we've used.

So go get it. It's a great phonics app. We got the whole series.

Love,
Amanda & Cubs

At-Home Speech Therapy Exercises for Receptive Expressive Language Disorder - Late-Talking

There is a wonderful page on a site that has some great ideas for talking to a child who has language deficiencies - the site is Speech Therapy on Video and the page is here. In case it is ever not available, you'll find it here too.

Whether or not a professional is helping your child, you should continue your child's therapy at home and these are specific things you can do. I've read so many times to just talk to them, but this is a list of specific exercises that produce results. At first, my son could not do any of these, but we kept practicing and we still work on his language everyday with these same exercises and I have been seeing real improvement.

I am not kidding when I say that I am so glad to feel that I have a guide. I am the type of person that needs to read specific exercises with real explanations and I have brought my son from not being able to do any of these 9 months ago to naming a long list of opposites, differentiating between fruits and animals, and that a green light means go and a red light means stop and more. This last week he played his first game - Red Light, Green Light. There's no way he's have been able to follow direction, understand the concept, and play that months ago.

Even more than these exercises though, I believe that just spending that much time with him, focusing on him and having him know that I wanted him to talk - I think that was the biggest difference of all. Children are good and want to please us - they just need to know how.

Love,
Amanda and Cubs

Online Learning Games for Toddlers and Preschoolers

I love this site for educational preschool learning games that I ran into the other day: Literacy Center.net - The Early Childhood Education Network!

My late-talker interacts most with me when he is having fun.  Play is just a wonderful way for him to learn, retain what he has learned, and practice talking over and over again without getting tired of the activity. It has however been difficult for me to do the things HE enjoys.

It was hard for me to see that he did not like reading and crafting for lengthy periods of time. Twenty minutes tops. Technology is just what he enjoys, and so as long as it is a family activity, we allow him to enjoy a lot of it -- way more than other moms let their kids, but we've got a difficult situation here, and I think every mom can relate to whatever works, do it!

During the week, my son plays with a Apple computer, Nintendo Wii, an Apple iPad, and our iPhones. On the weekend, he can play with his Nintendo DS. I do limit his individual playing time to 30 min to an hour as well as his playing non-educational games. Everything else, he must be playing and talking with a parent. The husband is better at playing, I'm better at talking so we're still working this situation out - but the results are clear - he talks a lot more than he did a year ago when we kinda started this. It has been a nice family experience.

I do have some requirements to all this screen time though. He must eat meals at the table, he has to have a technology-free morning, he must run around and play with his sister for an hour or two running around and doing what she likes to do, practice writing, and he has to read 20 minutes with me before bedtime.  And all that doesn't even guarantee his tech time if we have shopping or errands to do - it all depends and he knows not to demand or expect any game time. He's actually very understanding and tantrum-free, which is why I think we allow him to play as much as we do -- it seems like a lot of time to me, but maybe it's way less than others.

I love the learning games of course. Nick Jr. and Sprout. Scholastic and BBC have a few great ones too. The site we found through readquarium (and Gamequarium), is a wonderful site LiteracyCenter.net - I hope you check it out with your little one because it has a lot of games for teaching or reviewing the basics.

Other sites I've checked out a couple times are Funbrain and  Funschool - although we have yet to fully explore these :)

Love,
Amanda and Cubs

Speech Therapy Help - So Great for My Late-Talker

I ran into this wonderful website from their pins on Pinterest. It's called The Learning Curve and is a Speech Language Pathology Resource. What is most helpful is this form of How to Track Communicative Intent - the post is here and I love it.

I am planning on homeschooling my son and he is about a year behind in his language ability. Had I had this form earlier, it would have been great, but now is fine too because it helps me focus on what he is saying and see the areas in which he is still struggling. Then I can model those type of questions or phrases so he begins to understand and hopefully use them.

Even if he was in school or in a speech class, I'd love to have this to follow his ability at home and to have something to show at a meeting about his progress and goals (I am a teacher so I would have loved if parents brought this type of documentation).

Love,
Amanda & Cubs

Construction Paper Shapes into A,B,C Animals

I have been trying something new lately and that is to do crafty stuff with my kids. Browsing around at all the great stuff out there, I had a ton of construction paper but not many ideas that were suited to our situation.

My son is a late-talker yet knows a lot of other information already. He already knows his alphabet and its sounds, uppercase and lowercase, and all of their signs in sign language. He knows a lot of animals. So I thought a paper craft to use up some of this construction paper putting letters together to form words of animals he knows would be challenging and something new for him.

They are simple but I've seen positive results from it. He says the letters, then the word they form, so there's his early reading (that's the goal anyway). I'm also using this to teach emotion, so he calls each animal 'happy' too which is really cute. Everyday, it hangs on the wall and he describes it like ten times a day. My future animal groups will be mad, confused, etc. Can't wait!

This is our A-N-T, our happy ant. He does look happy right?

Elijah knows a lot of shapes already, even crescent, but this is an excellent way to practice and make sure he stores them into his memory. I talk to him about the colors, asking him questions like, "what color or letter or shape is this?" Monica is napping so it's a nice hour or two of just casually interacting that I'm hoping will increase his talking.

Our new shapes were half-circle and I called the antennae zig-zags :) .
  

My son isn't great at gluing and cutting so obviously I helped guide his hands a lot! It's my fault, I haven't done this with him near enough as I should have.

 

Short sentences to practice short words and become familiar with how they look written.

It's hard because I don't want to go so far that he's confused but I want him to be challenged with something new. I thought that I would spend his 3rd year entirely on letters and numbers but it seems like you have to prepared to be unprepared...sheesh.

 

We do one a day, not on weekends when daddy's home, but he's already getting a bit better at gluing. Although, I am kind of a control freak and am heavily helping him put them in the right spot.

Here's B and C...

 

New shape was a tear drop. Little sister actually got a hold of this and ripped it apart, but it still looks good. Keep your paper crafts away from the smaller ones!

 New shape was a football. The eyes, paws, and tail weren't real shapes. I was a little pressed for time since I didn't prep this one. Prep work is a challenge!

I hope to make A-Z animals and A-Z objects and put them all in a binder in those clear page protectors so that he can write on the sentences in the back.

Love,

Amanda & Cubs

Progress in Elijah's Speech Delay

Elijah has a speech delay for those of you who were not in the know. He'll be three in less than a month and he says about 20-30 words. So far, I've been able to accomplish with him:

~potty training (that was a research process - maybe some day I'll explain my method - it was genius - I should have it published) and he takes himself to the toilet and calls me
~entire alphabet in sign language (ASL)
~he can say all of the letter sounds and identify them when asked e.g. What makes the fff sound? He points to 'F'
~he signs about 20 other words including milk, gorilla, and airplane
~he traces all the letters and numbers 1-10 with his finger
~he knows the order of the alphabet and can type it on the computer
~he knows that 'big' letters are different from 'little' letters
~he understands a lot of words, probably between 300-500, and can point them out
~he can say each sound of a letter in a word, like p-puh, i-iii, g-guh (just can't put them together)
~he can follow commands without gestures e.g. go put that on the table, go get my water bottle


But what is better than all of that?
The love he shows his sister in wanting to share with her what he has learned...love is all that counts anyway.