Late Entry into Thirty Days of Play Challenge

We're late joining up but I'm excited to join Hands On: As We Grow and The Imagination Tree in the 30 Days to Hands On Play Challenge. You can read about it here and here. Every day, they take turns providing a play idea for us to try. We are going to put aside 15 minutes a day of dedicated, non-interrupted play.

At our house, we do "special time" at least once or twice a day but those are times when I promise to allow no interruptions and I allow Jack to lead the way in play. This will be a separate time of play where I will attempt to lead the way with a play idea.

I don't want to go all legalistic on us by going back and doing all the play ideas that have already been presented this month so I'm going to do the day 1 challenge of saying what I hope to accomplish in the challenge and tomorrow we'll dive in with the challenge for day 17.

From http://www.theimaginationtree.com/2011/11/30-days-to-hands-on-play-challenge.html:

Day 1:

Today's activity

Spend a little bit of time thinking about this challenge. What do you hope to gain?

Think about your child (or children) What do they really love doing? What are they good at? Their special interests? This will be really helpful as the challenge unfolds.

My answer:
I have a very simple short goal: to expand our play. We get stuck in a lot of doing the same things. Jack and I both tend to like things staying the same BUT we need some fresh new things to try to improve Jack's development and mine.

Jack loves to move, move, and move some more--run, jump, bounce, skip, ride anything with wheels. As Jack's speech continues to emerge, he likes to play with sounds, words, and phrases. He is most joy-filled when he has my full attention and we are playing together. He tends to be a "sensory seeker". He enjoys swinging, being squeezed tightly and spinning (himself, balls, pinwheels, wheels, and gears and anything else he can get to spin). He does not do much make believe or fantasy play except playing with Elmo.

I'm excited! Wish us luck and say a prayer as we work on expanding our play repertoire. I probably won't post everyday but will more likely do a recap every now and then of how things are going with the different challenges.

Here's my partners in play:

Spring Break

New to the Life is Therapy series? Here's a quick blurb to tell you what it's about:

Sometimes we parents can get bogged down in the notion that the teaching of our children must be done by professionals. Parents of children with special needs are particularly vulnerable to this idea since children with special needs often have to learn and develop quite differently than children with typical needs. This series centers around the idea that learning can and does occur most effectively through everyday life experiences at home and out in the community--for children with both typical and special needs.

It's Spring Break in our local community. This week, I'm just encouraging you to go be silly with your kids.

Later, when you reflect on the silly fun you had, you may realize just how many "Life is Therapy" moments you had. Come back and tell me about them! Get out there!

Recent Life is Therapy Posts can be found at:
Boring is Good
Just Snuggle
Get Your Boredom Going



For more Life is Therapy Posts, check out the left side bar.

Now it's your turn to participate. This is where we share our ideas and stories with one another. We're all in this together. Let's laugh together, motivate one another, and stimulate each others ideas. If you have a blog, create your own "life is therapy" post and put a link to your post in your comment. If you don't have a blog just leave a comment with your life is therapy story.

Life is Therapy--Goals

New to the Life is Therapy series? Here's a quick blurb to tell you what it's about:

Sometimes we parents can get bogged down in the notion that the teaching of our children must be done by professionals. Parents of children with special needs are particularly vulnerable to this idea since children with special needs often have to learn and develop quite differently than children with typical needs. This series centers around the idea that learning can and does occur most effectively through everyday life experiences at home and out in the community--for children with both typical and special needs.

For the last few weeks, I've written about how to get your child's attention, remembering how far your child has come and noticing what your child is doing. That's a whole lot of time spent paying attention to where your kiddo has been and what he is currently doing but you want your kiddo to learn, to grow, to develop, not to stay where he has been or where he is. It will happen. I promise!

But first, let's talk a little about expectations. If you're new to the blog, take a moment and go back and read this post about expectations and then this follow up post. The point is that a parent's expectations and your ability to let go of those expectations or not can really make a difference in whether you and your child are enjoying your time together.

And a child is really not learning a whole lot when he is fussing and whining and crying and focused on the fact that he/she is unhappy for whatever reason. A child cannot focus on what you are trying to help him or her learn when he/she is upset. Go ahead. Try it for yourself. Next time you get good and mad for any reason, pick up a how to book on something you've never done before and give it a try. You are not going to achieve your best results.

Being able to let go of expectations does not mean that you don't set goals for your child. I'm not even telling you to not have expectations. Expectations and anticipation can be a lot of fun as long as you are willing to realize that things may not work out quite as you expect and that's okay too.

So, how should you set goals? What can you expect? Dr. James MacDonald is very fond of saying on his Communicating Partners Yahoo message group that you should expect your child to do a lot of what he is already doing and just a little more. He encourages parents to be the child plus one.

The idea is that you meet your child where he/she is. Join the child at his current ability level and then show him/her just the next step. This doesn't work only with speech and communication. It can work with absolutely anything that you want your child to learn.

For example, when your child first learns to walk you allow him/her to hold on to your fingers. Slowly but surely you drop the amount of support you provide. You would not expect your beginning walker to run a marathon the day he/she starts walking. That would be silly, wouldn't it?

What are some other concrete examples? Let's talk about getting dressed. The ultimate goal for most people is to have your child be able to dress him/herself independently and look this smashingly handsome

You can't just hand your kiddo a stack of clothes and expect him/her to know what to do. You have to pick a starting point. Many therapists recommend a technique called "Backwards chaining". The idea is that you allow the child to finish the process. Think of the steps involved in putting on a shirt.
1. Put one arm in shirt sleeve.
2. Put other arm in other shirt sleeve.
3. Pull shirt over head.
4. Pull shirt down over torso and down to waist or however long the shirt is.

In backwards chaining, your first point of focus would be getting your child to do step 4. If your child is not yet helping with dressing at all, you will first make sure to talk about all the steps but particularly pay attention to step 4. Then after your child is in the routine of hearing you talk about each of the steps, you add one more thing. You ask him/her to help complete step 4. At first, you will assist him/her in doing it but gradually you provide less and less assistance until the child is doing step 4 independently. Once your child is confidently doing step 4, you ask him/her to assist with step 3 and so on until suddenly, magically one day he/she snaps that shirt on all by him/herself. Again, I can't guarrantee you these kind of adorable results....

which would be much more adorable if my camera phone were not acting strange.

but I can tell you that you will be quite surprised to find out how much your child is able to do using these techniques.

There are several ideas incorporated here. You are breaking up the task into manageable bits. You are breaking the manageable bits into even more manageable bits. You are not overwhelming your child with an unreachable goal. You are allowing your child the success of finishing the task each time versus keeping your child in a mindset of needing you to finish the task.
To review other Life is Therapy posts, click on the title:
Introductory Post
Prepositions at the Park
Rainy Days
Getting Your Child's Attention
Relfecting on Where You've Been
What's in Your Child's World


Now it's your turn to participate. This is where we share our ideas and stories with one another. We're all in this together. Let's laugh together, motivate one another, and stimulate each others ideas. If you have a blog, create your own "life is therapy" post and link to the specific post in the Mr. Linky below. If you don't have a blog just leave a comment with your life is therapy story.

Life is Therapy--How to Get Started

New to the Life is Therapy series? Here's a quick blurb to tell you what it's about:

Sometimes we parents can get bogged down in the notion that the teaching of our children must be done by professionals. Parents of children with special needs are particularly vulnerable to this idea since children with special needs often have to learn and develop quite differently than children with typical needs. This series centers around the idea that learning can and does occur most effectively through everyday life experiences at home and out in the community--for children with both typical and special needs.

It occurred to me that there may be some people reading this series that may be very much like me and have difficulty with spontaneity and just plain old playing. You can see from my examples how the different things we do work on specific goals that a child needs to accomplish but you don't really know how to apply it to your situation or the things your child needs to work on. You need to be told exactly what to do and exactly how to get started. Don't worry! I get you. I AM you.

The very reason I created this series was to get some interaction and sharing of ideas going. If you have a specific situation or question that you'd like to see addressed, leave a comment with your question. I will answer--maybe even do a whole post about it--and others can see your question and answer too. You will be amazed at how other people's ideas and similiar situations will light a spark in your brain.

First things first. How do you get your kiddo to play the way you want them to so you can work on those goals that you and/or kiddo's teacher or therapists have set for said kiddo?

I have mentioned before the work of Dr. James D. MacDonald. He teaches you how to become your child's Communicating Partner. One of the most basic yet powerful things that I have learned from Dr. MacDonald is that you must first enter your child's world before you can expect him to engage you in yours. The world of children is fun and playful and imaginative not full of rules and set ways of behaving like the world of adults.

So, the very first thing you must do to get your child working on your agenda is to put your agenda aside for a moment. I know that seems counterproductive but I promise you that if you do it, you will wonder why you never tried it before.

Pay close attention to your child and how he/she plays. What is he/she interested in? What is he/she doing? Don't worry about whether he/she is doing whatever it is right. Whatever he/she is doing (that is socially acceptable behavior) is right. That's where you start.

Here's a short video that illustrates the difference between putting forth your agenda and joining your child in his chosen activity.

My agenda here was a pretty simple one. Jack needs to work on interacting with others more and doing more of a give and take kind of thing. I wanted him to splash with me.

Did you notice how I started out not paying attention to what Jack was doing and trying to get him to do what I wanted? It did not matter how many things I threw in that tub or how animated I was in saying "Splash!" Jack did not care what I was doing. If you think about it, he was actually copying my behavior. I did not seem to care what he was doing so he did not care what I was doing.

Jack was spinning Irish in the tub. Once I started singing about spinning, I had Jack's attention. Notice how he perked up? He then told me what to sing and then sang along with me.

Once I had his attention and said, "Splash!" he enjoyed splashing for a brief period*.

*Now let me say that I would have been able to hold Jack's attention a lot longer if I had been physically interactive as well as verbally interactive but I knew the camera was rolling and I was feeling like a bloated whale with stringy hair having a bad body image day and did not wish to be on camera.  

I entered Jack's world of spinning Irish and then showed him a next step of singing about it. He followed right along with me.

Other Life is Therapy Posts can be found at:
Introductory Post
Prepositions at the Park
Rainy Days

Now it's your turn to participate. This is where we share our ideas and stories with one another. We're all in this together. Let's laugh together, motivate one another, and stimulate each others ideas. If you have a blog, create your own "life is therapy" post and link to the specific post in the Mr. Linky below. If you don't have a blog just leave a comment with your life is therapy story.

Life is Therapy

I am starting my first ever blog series. I hope that it will be informative, encouraging, helpful, and fun.

Sometimes we parents can get bogged down in the notion that the teaching of our children must be done by professionals. Parents of children with special needs are particularly vulnerable to this idea since children with special needs often have to learn and develop quite differently than children with typical needs. This series centers around the idea that learning can and does occur most effectively through everyday life experiences at home and out in the community--for children with both typical and special needs.

The other piece to this puzzle is that just about everything can be therapy of one kind or another. Jumping in a pile of leaves? Sensory therapy (crunch of the leaves, feeling of fall after the jump), emotional therapy (joyful exuberance), play therapy (work out some pent up energy), social therapy (turn-taking as you wait for your chance to jump in the pile), physical therapy (gross motor skills required in jumping), vision therapy (identifying the pile), kinesthetic therapy (using combined senses to know when to jump), speech therapy (talking about the leaves, saying boom or crunch), and occupational therapy (picking up leaves). Get the picture?

Here's some more examples. Back in this post, I joked that Jack was getting blue speech therapy by sucking an icee through a straw. Well, it actually is speech therapy. Sucking through a straw works the muscles required for speech and sucking up an icee requires the recruitment of more muscles than say water. This post was an example of how swinging can be used for speech therapy. Of course, swinging is also sensory therapy. Riding a tricycle is physical therapy. Every bite of every meal or snack can be vision therapy and fine motor therapy and sensory therapy as the child finds, touches, and tastes their food. Get the picture?

This series is not just for children with special needs either. Parents of children with typical needs don't really call it therapy when their children practice their skills such as potty training but it's basically all therapy. We're all trying to help our children to develop skills to help them have the best lives they possibly can.

This is where we share our ideas and stories with one another. We're all in this together. Let's laugh together, motivate one another, and stimulate each others ideas. If you have a blog, create your own "life is therapy" post and link to the specific post in the Mr. Linky below. If you don't have a blog just leave a comment with your life is therapy story.

After that long-winded introduction, here is therapy at breakfast starring Jack!


***More Life is Therapy:
Prepositions at the Park
Rainy Days

Halloween 2009--A Lesson in Expectations

I'm going out of order here. I'm behind on posting other recent events but I'm going to go ahead and put up our Halloween pictures. We went to a pumpkin patch again this year. We went back to same one that his school went to last year. I will post pictures from our Pumpkin Patch adventure later. We picked out this pumpkin.....

This year, I was inspired by pictures of Kelly's family carving their pumpkins. She posted them on Facebook so if you are her friend on Facebook, go check them out or go post a comment at her blog asking her to put up her pumpkin carving pictures like I did.

Jack's co-teacher, Mr. Daniel, reported that Jack LOVED putting his hands in the pumpkin at school when they carved the class pumpkin. Jack loved it so much that Mr. Daniel got all the pumpkin goo out and set it on the table so that Jack could play with it some more. Ms. Sunny and I were delighted to hear it but very surprised since Jack is very picky about textures and generally does not like to touch gooey things.

Kelly's inspiration and Mr. Daniel's gooey goodness story started a little fire burning in my brain. Oh, what fun our family will have carving a pumpkin this year! I expected that the three of us would get into it together. Alas, Jack just wasn't into it. At first, I thought maybe he was just waiting for the pumpkin goo. I wanted a picture of him marking on the pumpkin to create the template but Jack doesn't like to draw so we just posed this shot.

Turns out that Jack wanted nothing to do with our pumpkin or our pumpkin goo. David cut the pumpkin open and we tried to get Jack to feel around the inside but he wanted nothing to do with it. So next I carved out the face I had drawn. It was my first pumpkin carving in a very long time and I couldn't make the teeth so we went for a great big smile....

So then I thought well maybe he did not like the plain ol' pumpkin but Jack will be enamored over this pumpkin with a face!

Ummm....not so much....

Then David grabbed a candle and lit up our pumpkin. Alright, I thought, Jack's going to love this!!!!

Or maybe he'll just love the railing on the porch as usual....I don't think he ever really noticed that pumpkin. But, you know what? He had fun when we let him swing or run around outside after dark.

After that picture, we got Jack his favorite dinner (ham buh guhs and pie) and rented Fantasia because we thought we'd all love the music and Jack might enjoy the visuals. Jack did love dinner and he loved walking around outside the movie rental store. Fantasia locked up a bunch (old DVD I guess) but Jack really enjoyed just spending time with his Mama and Daddy. Let it go, I told myself. So what if we did not really do the pumpkin carving as a whole family! The important thing is to enjoy ourselves as a family. It really doesn't matter what activity we do or how we do it, right?

Lesson learned......ummmmm....or maybe not....

I had my heart set on Trick or Treating this year. Jack and I sort of did a dry run when we went door to door selling coupon books. He loved knocking on people's doors and he loved being outside. Perfect! I thought Trick or Treating is going to be the best thing ever! Lots of doors to knock on, other kids everywhere, Yipppeeeeee!!!!

I dressed in a costume that I kid you not had little boys everywhere getting huge grins on their faces, pointing and stammering, "T-t-t-t-t-t-t-homas!" My kid is gonna LOVE this!!!!

I thought our trick or treating pictures would look like the ones featured here.

Jack had fallen asleep on our way home from visiting with friends (another fun post coming later). I knew it would be a bit of a late evening so I just let him sleep while I put out our candy and got in my costume. He woke up a little ill but I thought once we got started he would cheer up. Alas......

our cute train engineer only wanted to walk in the dangerous road. NOT GONNA HAPPEN especially not in the dark on Halloween.
We tried walking abit but Jack stayed upset and only wanted to be carried. He clearly wasn't enjoying it. I kept asking him what was wrong and it finally dawned on me that it was kind of late and Jack had not had dinner. In my excitement, I had forgotten to plan for dinner. I gave up on trick or treating in the neighborhood and we headed off to McDonald's and our usual Halloween party.

I experienced another "Duh" moment when Jack started chewing his sleeves like his life depended on it. Uh oh, teeth, I think my little guy is getting some more teeth. So he was hungry and hurting upon awakening from a nap only to have his Mama hurriedly rush him through putting on a costume and parading around for the neighborhood. Hmmmm....not your best set up for success.

After the ham buh guhs and running around and seeing the other kids at the party, we found ourselves having a good time after all....

How could you not? There was music, there were other kids and the bouncer.....

At the end of the party, I took off Jack's costume and we stomped around outside. Look who's having fun now....

Note to self: Drop the expectations, make sure that kiddo is as healthy as can be, as rested as can be, as pain free or distracted from pain as possible, well fed and well hydrated and just follow the fun. Life is much happier that way!!!!

"Speech Therapy" at the Park

We learned about Dr. James D. MacDonald and his approach to helping children learn to talk from one of Jack’s speech therapists last summer. We began applying the things we learned but didn’t really truly “get it” until after we joined his Yahoo Communicating group and a similar Yahoo group called Natural Late Talkers. I combed through the resources of their file section and dove headfirst into Dr. MacDonald’s book Play to Talk. It changed the way we began to think of not only Jack’s speech therapy but all of his therapy. It made us remember that every person has to go through stages of development. You can’t leap through development. You go through each part before you get to the next. I can post more on that later….
Anyway, we’ve put Dr. MacDonald’s ideas into practice and Jack’s speech continues to flourish. Here’s a little sample of Jack and I having a communicating partners-style conversation at the park. In this video, our conversation does happen to be with words but you can interact with your child non-verbally before words and even after words begin to build a foundation for a child to learn to stay with people, to enjoy people, and to be interested in people.
I’ve included a transcript here of our conversation since some of it is difficult to understand.


M: You gonna swing? (Great vocab, Mom!)
J: Whee
M: (laughs) Whee!
J: Highlights from 5 symphonies (sometimes he smooshes lots of words together. I recognize what he says because it comes from the beginning of Baby Beethoven). Hamster. Hamster (When he thinks of his favorite videos, he thinks of his favorite parts and Baby Beethoven has a hamster that spins on a wheel. These days anything that spins reminds him of the hamster.)
M: Hamster?
J: Doo doo doo doo (more Beethoven)
M: Doo doo doo doo
(Notice we continued to do the “musical exchanges”. These may not be real words but Jack enjoys interacting back and forth this way. See how many “turns” he takes with this?)
J: Swing
M: Swing!
J: Hey shhhh….Hey hey swing
M: Swing!
J: Help
M: Help?
J: Stop
M: Stop?
J: Stop
M: Push? (I was suggesting that he stay on the swing and I push him some more. Since he was using one word phrases, I did too.)
J: Push

J: Stop stop stop
M: Stop?
J: Stop
M: Stop?
J: stop
M: Stop yes? (This is a little bit of a technique called recasting. We are trying to get Jack to learn to answer yes instead of just repeating what he wants.)
J: yes (He’ll answer yes but right now it usually requires prompting. He’ll get there.)

J: Swing. Push.
M: push?
J: All done get out (again smooshing of the words)
M: All done?
J: Da (that could have been stop but sometimes he goes Russian on us and says Da instead of yes.) All done.
M: Stop?
J: Stop. Irish. (It’s his lovey—a green basketball with “Luck of the Irish” on it for those of you who aren’t familiar with Irish.)
M: Now what?
J: Searching. (Jack has visual difficulties and used to just ask us to bring him stuff he wanted. I began encouraging him to help me look by walking around with him saying, “Searching, searching, searching for _____”. It stuck and now whenever Jack wants to look for something he says “Searching”)
M: We didn’t bring Irish.
J: Go go. (There are certain words and phrases he tends to repeat. Go is usually go go and sit down is usually sit down sit down.)
M: You want to go? (Sometimes he’ll actually say “I want _____”)
J: Irish. Please (we were kind of overlapping here at the end)
M: Go get Irish?
J: Please. (Instead of saying yes he will either repeat what you say or say please.)