Summer lovin’

I am so lovin’ my summer!

I have enough of a schedule working at the speech clinic twice a week from 4ish to 8ish to keep my brain active (and income).  Plus enough time to play and work on the house we moved into 8 months ago. Yes I did get those basement boxes unpacked and “treasures” put up. But Mondays are all about Brooke.

Brooke is my 7-year-old granddaughter and I get her from Sunday nights and all day on Mondays. Having grown up with only boys (2 brothers and 3 sons) it is really fun to have a girl around. This is what we did recently. We were talking about what we wanted to do and realized many ideas started with the same letter. So we decided we could only do activities that fit the pattern.

So here is what we did on our F-ing day.

F-irst we visited  F-amily– my mom

F-ueled the car

F– awn-doe-rosa visit and F-ed the animals

F-ireworks F-orever to get ready F-or the F-ourth

F-ood (lunch) at the Bison F-arm

F-un shopping F-or a F-riend’s baby gift

F-inally home and ate different F-lavors of ice cream

We had fun thinking of ways to make ‘F’ F-it into our day. I think we will try this again.  I wonder what letter we will tackle next?  What sounds will you try in your days?

Now how about a therapy twist or some parent summer activities:

1. Take the sound a kiddo is working on in speech and do activities that fit-  Working on /s/- tell stories, speak in whispers, sneak around on your tiptoes while finding /s/ words or cards or do a scavenger hunt for /s/

2. Create a pretend meal using drawings, or pictures cut from grocery ads but all the food must contain a target letter/sound in it’s name and glue all of these on a paper plate to share. Ex: gummy bears, graham crackers, doggie treats, grapes, arugula

3.  Work on phonemic awareness or letter  identification: Choose a letter sound and put out objects or pictures- Then ask which one begins with ___.  For phonemic awareness say the sound the letter makes such as “TTT”  if a toad in one of your objects. For letter identification say the letter that the object starts with such as “T”  if a toad is one of your objects.  Be careful with some sounds like /G/ as it can make two different sounds as heard in /go/ and /giraffe/.

4. Use an app like Doodle Buddy (free), Interactive Whiteboard (free) or Showme  (free) to create a scene with a target letter or sound. Brooke and I used  ShowMe to recreate our day. She drew pictures and narrated the story so she could show her mom and dad.

5. Use a print out of a newspaper comic strip, short story, poem, etc. and grab your highlighter then ready set go and highlight all target sounds or letters. How many did you find? How many did you miss? How many can you say?

6. Take the first letter of your name or the sound a kiddo is working on and make an outline of it on a sheet of paper or card stock. Then paste as many pictures as you can find that start with that letter/sound.

So now go put your own twist on these ideas!

Cindy

PS- I’d love to hear what you did so please leave a comment.