Aidan was so focused at speech therapy today. He did a categorization game with magnets — food, animals, transportation, clothes, and home. The SLP phased really gracefully from giving him choices between two categories — is the apple a food or an animal? — towards letting him pick them out himself as he got to understand the game.
Then he did some cards about pragmatics — “how would you feel if…” “What would you do if…..” He couldn’t get a handle on that kind of thing, so the SLP stepped back and asked him more concrete questions, like “What would you tell mom if you were hungry?” To my surprise he aced all these. So he understands conditionals.
Another game she plays with him is to lay down four cards with pictures he recognizes, and then ask him: “Which one cuts paper?” (etc.) He did those ones confidently too.
Finally, he did Secret Squares, and she asked him to identify them by function and then category.
She has a motivational technique of letting him put counters in a cup whenever he gets a correct answer. It works well for him and helps keep him interacting.
He got so much work done in this 40 minutes that we are thinking that 9:30 am is a better thinking time for him than 3 pm, though he seems to do all right in the afternoon — it just seems a bit harder for him to keep himself pulled together and on-task.
Later on we went for a walk outside with Liam, Clare, Kieron and Paddy. The little ones are getting better able to go longer distances. We talked about packing some provisions and spending a whole half day on a ramble — just stopping whenever the babies got tired, and enjoying the scenery. They were very interested in a large, bright dead butterfly on the path, and their habit is to stop and inspect whatever comes to their attention. Both made up stories about how they weren’t really dead.
Then I read Seabird and Archimedes to Kieron. We have changed the weekly schedule a bit so that there is more reading and less seatwork, and only four days a week of academics. That leaves more time for nature explorations, projects, free reading, and games.
Right now Liam, Sean and Aidan are outside again with the football.
Here is the boys’ spring checklist if you are interested. (This is an experiment — I’m trying out Google’s document publishing capability).
