Books, Boxes, Balls and a Little Parrot

Recently, my friend, Tammy, put together an amazing blog post outlining her theme of "Apples and Leaves." She is one of those "super moms" that you aspire to be and are proud to call your friend. While I'm not as organized nor as creative, I decided to post about the things that Thomas is loving right now while he works to listen and speak. He is starting to parrot back consonants, vowels, inflection and duration of sound. It isn't perfect, but I have to remember that Thomas isn't on his maintenance map yet and he has only been activated for a little over two months!

First of all...books. For some reason, probably because he is a 2-year old boy, Thomas loves trains (please, no Thomas the tank engine jokes). He loves the pop-up book "The Whistle on the Train." No surprise here, it is a take-off on the "Wheels on the Bus" book that Thomas destroyed several months ago. Listen to Thomas try to say, "ding, ding, ding."



Other books that Thomas loves right now are: Five Little Pumpkins; Five Little Monkeys; Polar Bear, Polar Bear; Goodnight Gorilla; and The Napping House.

Second of all...boxes. Last Spring, Ms. Sarah made a knock-knock box for Thomas and the other children in the mom-and-tot program at The Hearing School of the Southwest. We have used it actively since she gave it to him. Ms. Becky got Thomas completely hooked on wind-up toys. This is Thomas working with the box and his response to the learning to listen sounds "ss" for snake and "hop" for bunny. Something that I don't show you is that Thomas is able to pick from a set of 4 learning to listen toys when I ask him to grab a specific one.



After watching this clip, I heard the voice of Ms. Becky in my ear correcting what I'm saying to him. Maybe after Thomas is mainstreamed in school I'll go back to school to become a true AVT :-)



Other boxes that Thomas loves are: The A,B,C discovery boxes from Lakeshore Learning. They just arrived yesterday and are already a huge hit. Thomas' older sister, Sidney, got out the V, S, P and U boxes. We hold the boxes to our mouths and make the sound. Then, we hold it to Thomas' mouth and have him makes the sound. He made all the sounds, but V which came out sounding like B. I can't wait to film Thomas playing with these next time!

Finally...balls. A couple of weeks ago, I remember emailing Ms. Becky so frustrated that Thomas wouldn't say the word "ball" even though I knew that he could say it and he knew what a ball was. Out of desperation, I bought the bowling set from Target and we started "playing" more during therapy.

Not only do we get the word "ball," but Thomas is also trying to say the word "roll" and is starting to say "yahoo!" He is also vocalizing trying to count as I put the pins up to bowl again. Check it out in this clip!


Other ball ideas for you to consider are... a soccer net and soccer ball to use in the house. We work on "kick the ball" and "goal" and "try again" and "oh-no" and "yea!" Also, I recommend golf sets for outdoors only because we quickly found out that golf clubs are weapons of mass destruction when used inside the house on objects such as TVs, furniture and ovens and weapons of terror on things like his sister, the dog and yes, sad to say, mom and dad.

Again, I'm no Tammy but, here is my first stab at giving some ideas for therapy...I hope that you find it somewhat helpful or at least somewhat amusing.