Mommin' It Up!

December 2, 2011February 26, 2014

At-home occupational therapy activities for your child

When I first began working at home with Sophie to help her get past her developmental delays, I was pretty stumped on some OT activities. Speech seemed easier to figure out for me. Sophie had poor hand strength and needed to learn to cut. I could never get her to color – she just wouldn’t – so I just had to strap her in that booster seat and make her. So we had to start from the beginning with writing, drawing, and coloring. Here are some activities that are great to do with your child if he or she has weakness in those areas.

1) Cut with a purpose – cutting lines will get very boring, very fast. Look online for free printable cutting worksheets that make it a little more fun. Just do a Google search, there are tons out there. Or, get a workbook or two specifically for cutting. My very favorite are the Kumon workbooks (they also have plenty other types, not just cutting – they are all great.)

2) Salt time – It helps kids learn to write letters, shapes, etc. if they can feel the patterns with their fingers. To help them get the idea, just fill a shallow dish with salt, so that the bottom of the dish is completely covered. Then, simply have the child make a circle, a letter, whatever you are trying to teach them, in the salt with their index finger. You may have to show them first with your own finger, or hold their hand and guide them, but soon enough they will be able to do it on their own. Sophie always LOVED “salt time” and one of her favorite things to do was draw faces in the salt.

3) Lacing cards – these are great for fine motor planning – helping your kiddo learn to plan the steps they need to take in a process, as well as for finger agility. To help Sophie when we first started, I numbered the holes in the cards and had her complete them in the right order, otherwise she was just kind of putting the string into the holes at random. I also had to tie off the string with a knot about 1/3 of the way in – it was overkill to have her do ALL the holes in a lacing card, and the extra string got in the way. Doing those things helped her get a hang of the activity more quickly and cut down on frustration.

Well, there are three simple activities to do with your child, whether they need OT help or not! Again, I want to stress that I am not a professional, but these are things that worked for me when I was working with Sophie on OT goals.

Check out all my posts on helping your child overcome developmental delays here.

November 24, 2011

App Happy: Toca Boca

Let me tell how you much I am LOVING all the apps I am finding for kids these days. Today I am going to tell you about a few from Toca Boca, which aren’t necessarily intended for speech therapy but can definitely be used for that purpose. I bought a couple, loved them, and then asked Toca Boca to let me review a couple more. Sophie and Joshua love playing with these apps and they are just FUN, a great way to play and learn! First up is the Birthday Party app pictured above.

Parentings’ Birthday Party by Toca Boca is a cute little way for your child to have a virtual birthday party. You can play alone or with mom, dad, or siblings and friends. This app lets you choose from 3 types of cake and themed plates so you can set what kind of party you are having. Then, it’s time to pour the juice, serve the cake, blow out the candles, eat it, pop the party poppers, and open the present!

Then after you eat all the cake and drink all the juice (with a touch of your finger), do the dishes and you’re done – so you can start the fun all over again! This app is great for speech: ask your child either what they are doing, what they just did, or have them walk you through the sequence of events verbally. They will have so much fun, they won’t even know they are working on speech!

Next up is probably my favorite of all these I’m reviewing today: Toca Store. This app is fabulously fun! And it’s great for speech, not only for sequencing but for following multi-step directions. Your child can choose from a catalog which items will be sold in their store, then which items they want to buy, and how much each item costs. Then, of course, they need to pay! My kiddos have a great time with this one – there are so many combinations of what to sell and buy, and everything is completely child-controlled! But if you want to work with your child on speech using this app, you can direct the play to encourage following directions, story-telling, and sequencing.

Next up: Toca Hair Salon

Toca Hair Salon is another fun app that both my big kids really enjoy, and once again, has great applications for speech therapy – or is just plain fun to play for any kid. In this app, you choose from six different characters, then you can cut, comb, and style their hair in a variety of ways with a variety of tools! This is another great one to work on sequencing and multi-step directions.

Finally, we have Toca Robot Lab. I love this app! Here your kiddos can build their own robot from a variety of parts – there are tons of possible combinations! Then after the Robot is built, you can take him on a little mission and see how well he works. This is another great app for following directions and sequencing, working on naming body parts, etc. And it’s a little more “boyish” if your speech-delayed boy isn’t all that into the other apps. (But Sophie loves it just as much as Joshua does!)

All the Toca Boca apps are very reasonably priced, I think the most expensive one is $2.99. They are SO worth the money, so if you’ve got an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, definitely check them out! You can get them at the App store, and check out Toca Boca on Facebook or at their website.

I’m linking this up to Things I love Thursday at the Diaper Diaries. Go check it out!

November 17, 2011November 13, 2011

Things I love: More great speech therapy apps

My sweet husband got me an iPad for my birthday because he knew I wanted one to work on speech therapy with Sophie using apps. I was to-tal-ly surprised and excited, and immediately went crazy looking for apps to use with her.

One of the first ones I found was Language Builder from the Mobile Education Store, and it was just what I was looking for. It’s an app with beautiful, real-life pictures, and a record feature so that your child or student can record themselves saying a sentence about the picture, then play it back. There are options for different levels of play so that you can make the activity easier or more challenging. This was a great tool for Sophie and I to work on her descriptive language and sentence formation. It was very challenging for her at first, but she came to love it as she got better at it and could see the benefits of her hard work.

Since I liked Language Builder so much, I decided to purchase another app from Mobile Education Store – Story Builder. Again, this app completely met the needs of what I was trying to accomplish with Sophie – working on storytelling, sequencing, and descriptive language. Like LanguageBuilder, it has different levels of play so you can make it easier or harder, and hints you can turn on, off, or customize. It shows a picture and asks a series of questions about the picture which your child or student then records his or her response to. At the end, you play all the responses together and it makes a story. You can save the recordings and archive them if you want to listen to them later. This is SO fun and has resulted in some really cute stories from Sophie, and Joshua too. Joshua loves playing with it even though he has no speech delay whatsoever. It’s just really FUN! Sophie has done so well with it and I love being able to play her stories back.

Since I was so pleased with those two apps, I contacted Mobile Education Store to see if I could review some of their other apps. Next, I chose to try Speech Journal and QuestionBuilder.

Speech Journal was a natural follow-up to StoryBuilder and is just so much fun. It allows the student to create their own story from pictures on the iPad. They can either take a new picture to add to their story sequence or use photos that are already on the iPad. Then, they record a sentence or two about the picture, then add another picture – as many as they want to make up their very own story. I ADORE this app, and so do my kids. Sophie has taken her storytelling to a whole new level, and Joshua is enhancing his own creativity. I really encourage you to get this app even if you don’t have any speech therapy needs in your family. It is just a great way to play.

Lastly, I reviewed QuestionBuilder. This app displays a picture, then asks a question about the picture, giving the child several answers from which to choose. You can choose from Why, What, Where, and How questions or have the questions be asked at random. There are three levels of play and optional hints. This is great for helping a child learn to answer abstract questions. Some of them have been really challenging for Sophie and she is learning so much from it!

These apps are SO GREAT. Since I am just a mom, not a professional, I am so thankful for these tools that give me the materials I need to work with Sophie at home to help her reach her speech goals. We are having a great time together with these. Mobile Education Store has lots more apps for both iPhone and iPad, so make sure and check them out to see if there is one that meets your child’s speech needs.

Thanks, Mobile Education Store! Keep up the great work!!

I linked this post up to Things I love Thursday at the Diaper Diaries. Head on over there to see what others are lovin’ this week.

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Mobile Education Store provided me with Speech Journal and QuestionBuilder at no cost to help facilitate my review.