It’s TURKEY TIME! Thanksgiving is filled with family, friends, food and traditions. What do all these things have in common? Socialization! Thanksgiving Day and the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving provide us with wonderful natural language and social learning opportunities. We want to start helping you prepare your child for Thanksgiving now. The more familiar they are with Thanksgiving and the people that they will see, the more likely they will want to participate and interact with others on the actual day. The more they participate and interact with others on the actual day, the more they will create positive memories and associations with Thanksgiving, which will help them be excited and prepared for next year and also for other special events. This will lead to more friendships, meaningful relationships, a sense of belonging and prideful traditions. Today we want to focus on 3 simple things you can start doing now to help your child on the Day of Thanksgiving with all of these skills: Books, Thanksgiving Themed Activities and Family Themed Activities.
Read MoreHaving your child make a photo book for Halloween will help them in many ways:
-Cognitively recall past and future events
-Improve temporal skills (days of the week, last weekend, yesterday, tomorrow, etc.)
-Engage in conversations about their Halloween experiences. Their peers at school will be talking about Halloween. This activity will help your child be included socially and will help them take part in those conversations. Also, many people will be asking your child, “What did you do for Halloween?” or “How was your Halloween?” A Halloween book will help them respond and engage in conversations just like their peers.
-Increase Theory of Mind skills and perspective taking. When you are making the book with your child, you can talk about what your child did and what they liked, but also focus on who they were with, what those people did and what those people liked, their favorite parts, their costumes and more.
Read MoreGames are not only fun for all children and the whole family, but they address important developmental skills. Just to name a few:
-Joint attention
-Watching others and social awareness
-Turn-taking
-Waiting
-Sharing
-Visual-spatial skills
-Increased vocabulary
-Conversation skills
-Early math skills
-Early literacy skills
-Other academic concepts like colors and shapes
-Body-space awareness
-Sequencing skills
-Fine motor skills
-Hand-eye coordination
-Early problem solving and strategy skills
-Early predicting skills
-Lots more!
Read MoreWe use calendars within the majority of our therapy sessions. When they are little we work on them understanding the days of the week, months of the year, today, tomorrow, yesterday and more. You can find out more on how we teach these to our little ones in an upcoming blog “Teaching Temporal Concepts in a Fun Way” (keep a look at out it will be out soon)!
But for today’s blog we want to focus on how we use calendars for our older kids to focus on past events, theory of mind skills, perspective taking skills, social memory and more. Once again, you can complete this activity at home, in therapy and even at school.
Read MoreAt KidSpeak, LLC we offer a variety of different social groups so that all our children can have a good social group focusing on each of their individual social goals. We spend a lot of time first pairing all the children in the most appropriate group and with their best peer matches. When creating social groups you want to focus on pairing children on a few things: 1) what skills do they have in common, 2) what skills can they help teach the other children, 3) what skills can they learn from their peers, 4) do their personalities match, and 5) and much more.
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