Tuesdays are great with a visit from Ms. Michelle! She's so much fun.
Before we headed to OT, we worked really hard on our sounds.....and had the great excitement of a new family joining our sound neighborhood. To date, all of our sound families were 'cognates', the phonology term that refers to sounds that are produced in the same place in the mouth with the same type of airflow with the only difference in two sounds being voicing (voiceless or voiced). The eight cognates pairs are: b/p, t/d, k/g, sh/g (like barge), th/th, ch/j, s/z and f/v. We learned these earlier in the year and have spent the past weeks developing mastery with their identification, letter association, and phonemic awareness.
Today we were ready for more! Since there are no more cognates to learn, we moved on to the last three sets of sounds, which we will call cousins (they are produced in the same manner, but not the same place in the mouth). We began with the Nose Sounds, m, n, and ng. The kids worked hard to notice that all three of these sounds are made with airflow through the nose, noted by lack of production when the nose is held. We experimented by saying the sound before and while saying the sound. You cannot say any of these sounds with your nose closed!
We felt and listened carefully to note that all three sounds are noisy, but made with the tongue in different places (front to back as you say m, n, ng). Since they can't be 'brothers', we'll call them cousins since they are related, but not as closely as brothers. Instead of housing them in a separate 'house', we used the visual of an apartment building. I learned that our kids have a lot of cousins.....as they were all named! We will continue to increase our knowledge of these sounds the rest of this week before adding more new sounds next week.
Wow- that's a lot of accomplishments in the first 30 minutes of class!
Then, we were off to Ms. Michelle! She had an interactive sensory and movement letter activity. The kids selected letter cards, wrote the letter, acted out the animal, found the letter in a box of beans, and placed it on an alphabet wall. Ms. Michelle also brought these unusual soft stepping stones that squeeked when the kids jumped on them. We finished with turns crawling through her long fabric tunnel. They loved it!
We ventured outside for a short walk. We found a fire truck and ambulance in action (they had responded to a minor medical emergency down the street). The kids enjoyed seeing it and the community helpers waved and flashed their lights!
Yesterday we began our morning by revisiting our 'warm-fuzzy bucket-filling' behaviors. We've had a heavy focus on it for two days with remarkable progress. I'm so proud of the encouragement and nice words the boys are using. Continue to encourage it at home!
