Monday, April 28, 2008

Rising to the Occasion


Christopher is in the midst of speech therapy, and most of it has been focused on pronunciation. He can say "s", but tends to drop it when it is combined with another consonant. Thus snow becomes no, spider is pider, and school is cool. (He has other anomolies, like "outkide" for outside, but we haven't gotten there yet...). We have been working on the Swedish S+K, S+N and S+M a lot, but lately he has gotten extremely tired of being corrected - completely understandable. Moreover his "work" from the speech therapist, which was previously so fun and important, is now boring and pushed aside.

I thought we needed to inject some fun - and some English - in the whole scheme of things, so I enlisted Annika to help. First, we made a list of all the English S+consonant nouns we could find (spiderman, snow, screw, sponge), and tried to highlight the ones which were also S+consonant in Swedish (spindelman, snö, skruv, svamp). Then we went on a 5-minute treasure hunt around the house to find objects that we could use in a game. We did pretty well, and managed to assemble enough for a fairly challenging "what is missing" game. Then Annika invited Christopher - fresh from his bath, wet hair and diaper - to play a new game. And Annika was a total star! She was patient, engaging, and fun. She gave soft hints when needed, and kept Christopher focused and interested, and most importantly, not angry or frustrated. And Christopher loved the attention from his sister.

Now the next challenge will be a game for Benjamin tomorrow (he was feeling a bit left out).

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