Activities to Help Attention and Listening

With the history of “glue ear” (otitis media) and ear infections, it is no surprise to me that listening is one of LM’s biggest challenges. She was deprived in this important area of sensory stimulation very early in her life, which may explain her current auditory difficulties. So this is one of my most important focus areas.

The ability to pay attention and to listen is a vital skill for encouraging good communication skills. It is more than simply “hearing sounds” as the child needs to learn to filter sounds, to sort out which sounds are important, what they mean, to remember and to act on the new information. It is necessary for having two-way conversations. Here are some easy listening activities I have found, which are appropriate for young children:

“LM, LM, what do you hear?”

This is a simple activity we have been doing on the way to LM’s school, which is a good 15 minute walk. I ask LM to listen carefully to the sounds around and tell me what she can hear (e.g. card driving on the road, a plane flying, wind blowing, birds singing, etc.)

Copying Sounds

I have filled a variety of containers with rice, pasta, beads, etc. I put them on the table in front of LM and sit opposite her. I then ask her to turn away and listen. I pick a container and shake it while she is not looking. I then ask her to turn back and find the container I have just used and make the same sound. I recently started to make it more complicated by making a sequence of sounds and asking LM to make the sounds in the same order.

Songs and Stories

Quite often when I am reading a book for LM, her attention starts drifting off. When that happens, I give her a rattle and ask her to shake it every time a particular character or action is mentioned (e.g. “wolf” in “Three Little Pigs”). To make it more difficult, you can ask to do different sounds for different characters.

Drumming

I play a pattern of beats on the table with chop sticks and get LM to repeat it. I vary the strength and the rhythm of the sounds. To make it more difficult, you could use a variety of surfaces to bang on (e.g. different saucepan lids), a variety of sound-makers (shakers, rattles).

I will probably be updating this post if I find more activities of this sort.

Bye for now!

Speech and Language Therapy - Another DIY Project

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been searching different resources for some games and activities to help LM with her speech and language. Sadly, the UK National Health System has cut down on individual speech and language therapy system (if there was an “angry” font, I would have used it for writing this!) and we can't afford hiring professional help. As much as I understand that one needs to be qualified to help a speech-delayed child, I guess doing something about it is better than nothing.

I have found a few interesting activities and I will be writing these up here as I go. My plan at this stage is to focus primarily on language development, but I will be doing some work on speech and articulation too.

I can’t remember if I mentioned that LM is being raised in a tri-lingual environment, not because she has overly ambitious parents, but simply by the nature of our family composition. While my first language is Russian, her dad’s is Catalan, and, since we don’t speak each other’s languages, we have to communicate in English, which is also the language of the environment we live in. I can’t do much to help LM’s Catalan, but apart from Russian and may be even more than on Russian, I will certainly focus on English, which will be the language of instruction once LM starts school.

My current target areas are:

1.    Attention and Listening

2.    Comprehension

3.    Vocabulary Building

4.    Expanding Sentences

5.    Grammar

6.    Telling Stories

7.    Interaction

I will be using these to label my posts to make search easier for those who may be interested in this information.

Just a Quick Update

I have been quite busy recently and I haven’t updated my blog in a long time, so I decided to write a quick post just to show I am still around!

First of all, thank you Reei for becoming my follower! I am very excited and flattered! Reei has her own blog which is a great read and very insightful.

I am currently doing some research on the different ways to help kids’ speech and language development and will be writing about my findings soon. This is LM’s biggest challenge at the moment and as we have been generally let down by the National Health System, who have introduced further cuts to the funding and have cancelled all individual S&L sessions, I will need to do a lot of DIY work here.

For now, I just wanted to thank all those who visited and commented on my blog.

LM’s Mum

Egg Carton Math

I would like to vary LM’s experience with numbers and, inspired by Numicon, I came up with this idea of recycling egg cartons:

As you can tell, omelettes have featured extensively on our family menu recently!

Well, although these are far from the nice and sleek Numicon shapes, and they certainly do have limitations, I think they can do the job of providing a mental reference for numbers. There are a few activities I am going to do with LM and, if these go well, I may splash on the real thing.

My current list of activities, starting with the most basic, are:

1.   Sequencing the “shapes” from 1 to 10 and backwards;

2.   Matching number symbols to “shapes”;

3.   Odd/even numbers;

4.   Larger/smaller numbers;

5.   Understanding two-digit numbers (place value);

6.   Exploring number bonds for different numbers, e.g. 10 can be made of 1 and 9, 2 and 8, etc;

7.   Basic arithmetic, e.g. adding one more to each “shape” to get the consecutive one, or doing subtractions by covering some of the cups.

8.   Using the "shapes" as frames and practicing counting and arythmetic with small objects (placing them in the individual cups).

I suppose, I could stretch these further. If you have more ideas, let me know!

LM's Mum

New Challenges with Old Puzzles

Completing jigsaw puzzles are a great educational activity, which helps to develop manual dexterity, hand-eye coordination, memory, reasoning, concentration, etc., and I am happy it has been one of LM’s favourite activities. However, after completing any given puzzle a couple of times, she seems to start losing interest in it, so I have been looking for ways to “challenge up” her old puzzles. Here are a couple tricks I have learned:

1.   You can mix two or more different puzzles, depending on the difficulty, for example two 50-piece puzzles or three 30-piece ones are fine for LM for now as she is comfortable with 100-piece puzzles.

2.   Another way is to ask your child to do the puzzle upside-down with the pictures facing the table and with the shapes of the cuts as the only guide. LM quite liked this new approach!

If you know any other way to make a puzzle a bit more challenging, please let me know.

Music for Little Mozarts - Music for LM?

Although teaching playing music to LM is by far not the biggest priority for me at this stage, I would hate not to give her some sort of introduction to it. Besides, it is suggested that “playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brain's sensitivity to speech sounds” and “could help normal children as well as those with developmental problems”.

So after some research and thanks to the brillkids forum (which, by the way, is indeed a brilliant forum!), I have been pointed in the direction of “Music for Little Mozarts” series by Alfred Publishing. There is a free downloadable sampler at http://www.mflm.com/ which gives a bit more detail about the programme.

This programme can be purchased as a deluxe package (containing Level 1 only), but coming at a fairly steep £45, this, unfortunately, was not an option for me. So as much as I would like the whole kit, I decided to limit myself to a Level 1 Lesson Book, Level 1 Workbook and a set of Flashcards (the plush characters could become potential Christmas gifts though!). The set arrived yesterday and I already laminated some of the flashcards (the laminating maniac I am!).

I have gone through the first few pages and will need to think how to adjust it to LM’s peculiar learning style. Quite incidentally, and again on the same forum, I also learned about a series of “How to Teach Piano to Kids” lessons by Expert Village on YouTube, which ties up nicely with the “Music for Little Mozarts” approach and which is something I will definitely be referring to. (By some reason the lessons do not appear listed in order, so in case you, like me, get lost among the videos on the playlist, here is the order I think they should have been listed: the lesson, appearing as the last one, is, in fact, Lesson 1, the first one is Lesson 2, eighth – Lesson 3, fifth – Lesson 4, seventh – Lesson 5, ninth – Lesson 6, fourth – Lesson 7, third – Lesson 8, second – Lesson 9, sixth – Lesson 10.)

Sadly, I can’t afford buying or even hiring a piano at this stage, so I am hoping to go as far as I can with a little electronic piano LM got as a present from her relatives, and see where it takes us (wish me luck!).

Anyhow, I am not going to rush it at all and will only offer it to LM every so often, as the much more imperative staff we need to go thought with her on a daily basis leaves hardly any time for anything “extracurricular”.

I do hope she takes to it and likes it just like I do!

Calendar Time – October 2010

Here is a short update on our calendar time (you can read my previous calendar post here).

Apart from the new header, I have now added cards with the words “yesterday”, “today” and “tomorrow”, which we attach to the bottom of the corresponding number card with the help of tiny decorative pegs.

It was LM who gave me the idea: the first couple of times after we had put up a new number on the board, she would take the next one from the hook at the bottom of the board and attempt to pin it in the following cell. I explained to her that that was something we would do “tomorrow”. So now every time we put up the new date, she would point to the following card on the hook and say, “That’s tomorrow!”

This month I also started using our calendar time for doing some simple math activities. We count forward all the number cards we have so far put up and then, more importantly, we count them backwards, as it is something I haven’t done with LM so far. This has been quite painless so far as we have started with just a few numbers and will be gradually increasing them to 30.

I also decided to let LM choose the colour of the pin with which we attach the card to the board to create a pattern. For example, this month we have started with the easiest ABAB pattern and we alternate red and green pins.

That’s all for now but I will be adding more activities to our calendar time as it has so far been a big hit with LM.