Thank you to all of the friends, families and colleagues that visited us during the Open House on Jan 27th.  It was fabulous to meet new neighbors, reconnect with old friends, and show our new space to all of the people who have been encouraging and supporting us this past year!  We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly and hope you did as well!!  Here are a couple of quick pics.  See us on Facebook to view the whole album!  Blessings, Jamie, Julie and Sterling

We hope you’ll join us on January 27 for an Open House at our new clinic. Drop by any time from 3:00 to 7:00 for a tour. We’d love to show you around.

Definitely bring the kids. We’ll have activities and treats just for them.

We’re incredibly grateful to our friends, patients, and colleagues for the encouragement, support and referrals these last few months. You are wonderful blessings to us.

See you soon!

iGoogle.

We are thrilled to announce the “soft” opening of our new clinic in Sanford. We are located at 4011 SR 46 just east of Upsala in the North Seminole Business Center. Julie and I are giggly and excited about having a storage closet, an office with two desks, and wonderful treatment rooms that will enable us to serve even more families. Watch our website and Facebook page for the “GRAND OPENING” coming in January, 2012.  In the meantime, give us a call. We’d love to give our friends a private tour and a cup of freshly brewed coffee.  Just wait until tomorrow…coffee and coffee filters are still on my shopping list 

Super Duper, Inc. develops and sells a wide variety of resources for speech-language therapy and occupational therapy. They recently added apps available via iTunes and continue to offer free online CEU for therapists. We are not affiliated with them or on their payroll, we just really think they are awesome at giving the special needs community great tools to help amazing kids.

Parents, teachers and therapists alike will want to visit the Handy Handouts page of their website. It is a collection of over 300 information sheets on a wide variety of topics such as: What is a 504 Plan?; Teaching Prepositions; and Why is R So Difficult? Many of the more common needs, goals, and disorders are addressed in these free resources. In addition, a long list of relatively rare topics and disorders are also explained.

Check it out. Be empowered. Search the site by topic or keyword. You’re bound to find information to better understand and facilitate success for your student. Access the growing library at www.superduperinc.com/Handouts/Handout.aspx.

My sweet friend, who always oversees all the school work her three kids bring home, was stumped by the seemingly random worksheets her kids brought home from their speech therapy visits. She dutifully saved them all in folders, one for the child working on /s/ and one for each of the kids working on /r/. And there they sat. What a bummer! She needed to be empowered to take charge of speech practice at home.

So, I took off my friend hat and put on my speech hat. Here’s the gist of what we talked about.

Articulation refers to the sounds we use to make words. Some common articulation goals include accurate production of /l/, /s/, /r/ and “th.” We tend to target production of these sounds in a hierarchy, first in isolation, then in the beginning, end, and middle of words. Can you visualize the hierarchy? Once production in words begins to stabilize, we quickly transition to using the sound in phrases, then sentences, reading and conversation. Speech Pathologists continuously raise the bar to in increase sound accuracy in more and more speech environments.

So what exactly are parents and students supposed to do with those worksheets? Your SLP will send worksheets and word lists home to keep you informed of your child’s current sound(s) and to give you a resource for daily practice. You could simply have your child say the words on the page. But let’s face it. That would last for three days at best. Bor-Ing. In speech lingo, we call that a drill. It has its place in therapy, but isn’t usually super functional for home practice.

To help your child with articulation goals, give these ideas a whirl.

• Flashlight Search Cut apart the pictures or target words. Hide them in a dark-able room. (New word. You heard it here first.) Give your student a flash light and start the search. Each time a word is found, your student presents it to you and says it with his/her best effort.
• What am I thinking? Place a few target word pictures on a table. You describe one of them and the student has to guess which one you are thinking of.
• Grab Bag Find household objects that contain your child’s sound. (Check with your SLP if you aren’t sure if your objects are on target.) Place them in a pillow case. The child is challenged to guess what the items are without looking.
• Fishing! Making a DIY fishing game is pretty quick and easy. Get yourself a wooden dowel, a yard of string, a magnet and metal paper clips. Tie the magnet to the string and the string to the dowel. Slide a paper clip onto each speech target. Scatter them on the floor and encourage your student to say the word he is fishing for.
• Memory Make a copy of the target word picture cards. Glue them and the originals to construction paper. Cut them apart. Now you have two “decks.” Spread them on a table, face down. You and your child take turns flipping two at a time, trying to find the matches. Be sure she is using her best speech to tell what you are both turning over.
• Toss Across Gather a few tennis balls, bean bags or (my favorite) super bounce balls. Place a bucket or basket across the room. In order to get a ball from you, the keeper, your student has to give her best attempt at a target word. When they’ve all been tossed, start with a new batch of words.

There are moments for even the most patient of parents, when we utter those words in exasperation: Calm down! Sometimes we are trying to get an over-active child to stop swinging from the chandelier; other times we are encouraging an upset child to relax and be more reasonable. Whatever our reasons, the result we are looking for is the same: a calm, rational child who exercises an abundance of self-regulation.

Do you hear “self-regulation” batted around in conversation with teachers and therapists? When you talk with other parents, they may talk about self-control. We all need it to be functional in families, in school, and in society. Do we need to be teaching these skills explicitly or do kids learn self-regulation naturally? Yes and no. Some of us learn these skills as we go about navigating the challenges of daily life. But for kids with developmental delays, social difficulties, language disorders, or emotional challenges explicit instruction and practice are necessary. 

Let’s start with breathing. Telling a child to take a few deep breaths to calm down may have limited effectiveness. Lots of kids don’t really have the body awareness to do this like an adult or adolescent. Instead try blowing tasks.

• Fill a basin or sink 1/3 of the way with water. Squirt in dish soap. Give the child a straw and challenge her to fill the basin with bubbles. You can also do this with a large cup. Yes, this is exactly what you were yelled at for doing with your milk at the dinner table 25 years ago.
• Blow bubbles. If going outside isn’t an option, go to the shower. Put a target on the wall or floor and track the bubbles as they land. Crayola now makes colored bubbles and I have to say that despite their messiness, they are pretty cool.
• Sing with your child. I mean belt out the tunes. Loudly. It requires deep breathing and definitely changes the tone of the situation.
• Yoga, anyone? Gaiam has a kids series. The poses are easy to learn and deep breathing is emphasized throughout.
• Tear up a tissue like confetti. Place it on the end of a table. Encourage the student to blow through a straw to send all the pieces off the opposite end of the table. This requires deep breathing, but also control to get the bits and pieces to the goal.

One of the refrains we hear from parents is, “How can we help our child be more independent?” Given that so many of our boys and girls struggle to communicate or participate in activities of daily living without assistance, they are often more dependent on their families and caregivers than other kids. They rely on us to translate their words, make their beds and tie their shoelaces.

In order to make small changes that will faciliate your child’s independence, get down on his or her level and inspect your house. I’m serious. Take a look at the world within your home from your child’s perspective. Is the bed situated against the wall to prevent her from falling out? That’s great, but does that then make it difficult to make in the morning? Or are items the child often needs out of reach or disorganzed? I can relate to that.

These were trouble spots for my family and here are the solutions we employed.

•  wet bath towels left on the floor – ick! When I realized that my kids couldn’t reach the towel bars to rehang their towels, we put up adhesive hooks at their height on the back of the bathroom door. There’s no towel folding involved and they can reach. It may take a gentle reminder, but at least now they are able to get those wet things off the floor.
• back packs in the hall, kitchen, dining room - you get the idea. The kids can now reach the repurposed nursery peg board that hangs in the hall outside their bedrooms at their level. Other friends have purchased baskets or bins personalized for each child and placed by the front door. When homework is done, your student can put that backpack away. And then it’s easy to find in the morning. I love stress-free mornings.
• art supplies – does creativity have to be this messy? I used to tolerate chaos in this corner of my kitchen. Now we’ve tamed the chaos with a recycled bottled drink box and a few Mason jars. If your kids are still little, you’ll want to select plastic cups to keep supplies separated.
• little nick nacks will make me crazy  – where do they all go? You can organize toys in many ways, spending a little or a lot. Consider sorting toys into categories, placing each category in a bin, and labeling the bin with the name and/or a picture of what goes inside. When kids are playing set limits, allowing one or two bins out at a time. Because toys start off organized, kids are empowered to keep their things tidier and clean up independently.

Accomplishing new skills independently gives children a sense of pride in their work and their growing abilities. We can facilitate their independence with some simple adaptations at home.

Do you have suggestions for facilitating independence? We’d love to hear about it so we can share them with our community.

I have come to the sad realization that my children are not particularly good at losing, or, for that matter, winning.  I worry about this…how can they possibly succeed in life if they cry every time their sibling says (sarcastically) “Sorry” and kicks their pawn back to home? How can they have healthy relationships if they chortle with glee at someone else’s “Chutes and Ladders” misfortune?  My mother attempted, in vain, to teach my brother and me the art of graceful game playing.  I have followed in her footsteps and have tried, in vain, to teach my children that the important thing is to just “have fun.”  That winning and losing aren’t important.  That everyone is a “winner.”  Then I realized that these are the same children that see me jumping, yelling, shouting victoriously and wallowing in my sorrow every fall during college football season.  College football, of course, is actually important.  But it also occurred to me that my messages may not resound with them because they aren’t entirely true.  If winning isn’t important, then why do we keep score?

So, before they are exposed to my crazy fall fervor again, I decided to plan some intensive game playing sessions.  As I pulled open the door to my hall closet, it occurred to me that I had a treasure trove of therapy tools in my closet.  Here are some of my and Julie’s favorites…ones that will definitely make it on the game-day list….and ways that they can do double duty by not only teaching good sportsmanship but by boosting therapy. 

Boggle – early reading, spelling, visual discrimination

Guess Who – asking and answering questions, logical reasoning

Connect Four – great for artic practice, again good for spatial reasoning

Honey Bee Tree – turn taking, fine motor control, articulation practice (before each turn, child says target sound/word)

Candy Land – colors, self-control, turn taking

UNO- concepts of same/different

CastleLogix – spatial reasoning, visual discrimination, same/different – a single player game

Blokus- spatial reasoning, turn taking

Upwords – phonological awareness

Equate – mathematical reasoning and facts

Do you have favorite children’s games in your closet???  Suggestions for teaching the value of being a gracious winner and understanding loser???  Please feel free to share!!!

The centuries old practice of yoga is a wonderful way to address the needs of children with developmental challenges and you don’t need a certified yoga teacher to reap the benefits! Yoga benefits children who need help with sensory processing, self-calming, strength and coordination, motor planning and attention to task.  It can also help children sleep better at night, improve concentration, and improve their self-esteem. 
There are some great resources to help you get started with a fun, yet challenging yoga program at home.  “Yoga Kit for Kids” by Imaginazium uses flashcards with children in fun poses- such as “dog”  and “hero”  with a funny children’s poem describing each posture.  Once your child has a pose down pat, you can incorporate a “handwriting”  activity while they are in the pose.  For example, while they are holding the frog position, have your child draw a letter in the air as big as they can.  When they master the dog pose, have them trace a letter on the floor. 
Another good home program is a DVD called “GiggleYoLates”.  This was created by an occupational therapist and is a wonderful and fun DVD for kids in all skill levels.  I usually stop and start it for the children I treat, until they have a section mastered. 
Yoga is great for these rainy Florida afternoons and a wonderful way to get that OT work in.  Have fun!!

Submission by Rebecca Fenner, OTR/L