Is change hard for your child? Do they become upset when things within their daily routines change? Or do they begin to question you, “When are we going…..”, “Why are we……”, etc? With summer approaching we wanted to take this opportunity to discuss an amazing transactional support that you may find helpful this summer, Countdown Calendars. Countdown Calendars can help you and your child alleviate some of the stress that you may encounter throughout the year. The idea of a Countdown Calendar is to countdown to an event. This can be an event that your child is excited about, an event that your child is nervous about, an event that you want your child to experience, and more.
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 More“I am thankful for my family!”
“I am thankful for my friends!”
“I am thankful for my dog Landry!”
Thanksgiving is the time that we express how Thankful we are for people in our lives and more. But this may be a hard skill for our kids with language delays, language disorders, autism, social communication difficulties, ADHD, pragmatic difficulties and more….to Understand what “Thankful” means and to understand what/who they are Thankful for as well as express what they are Thankful for. Here a few different ideas to help your child understand what is means to be “Thankful”:
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.
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