Mittens

The Touch and Feel pool was full of geometric shapes of all different colors.  We made houses, snowmen, bicycles, and race cars.  We put two different colors together to see what new color could be made.  We also looked through the shapes and saw that everything we looked at turned blue, or green, or red, or yellow!

Ryan and Ethan were all about playing with the train track during open center time today.  They also enjoyed playing with the farm blocks and tractors.  Throughout the whole morning at the Speech Garden, I am constantly prompting Ryan and Ethan to expand their utterances.  I have never forgotten the advice given to me by one of my professors in graduate school---when working with small children with speech and language delay, you should always challenge them to say 1 more word then they are currently using.  So, for example, if your child comments on an airplane that he sees in the sky by saying, "Plane!"  You respond with, "Big plane" or "Loud plane." If your child says 1 word, you model the same utterance with a 2 word expansion....Say one, add one. Also, with Ryan and Ethan, I model the longer sentence and then prompt them to imitate my longer utterance.  Just your little speech and language tip of the day!

When we went outside to the two-year-old playground today, we found that it was taped off with caution tape and in major repair.  So we got to play on the big playground, which was actually quite a treat!  Ryan and Ethan spent most of their time playing with trucks in a large sandbox.  It was Ryan's mission to line up all of the big trucks, and Ethan liked rolling the trucks up the wall of the play  equipment, and then shooting them down the slide!

 So we continued to learn all about winter clothes today...specifically mittens.  Our book today was One Mitten by Kristine O'Connell George.  This book tells the story of a little girl and all of the fun things that she likes to do with her mittens-wave hello, make shadow shapes, pat her pet, clap, flap, and hold hands...to name a few.

After we read our book, we made our own set of mittens, connected by a piece of yarn so that we wouldn't lose them!  First, Ryan and Ethan colored the mittens and the mitten cuff.  Second, they glued the cuff to the mitten, and last they attached the yarn with a stapler.  I didn't get a picture of the stapling action, but if you use these pictures to ask them how they made the mittens, it will give them a visual support to help answer the questions.

1. What did you do first to make the mittens?

2. What did you do second to make the mittens?

3. What did you do last to make the mittens.  

First, we colored the mittens.

Second, we glued the cuff to the mitten.

As always, we concluded our language circle with a brief song to help review and tie it all together once more.  Ryan and Ethan also got a chance to dress me up in some winter clothes.  We reviewed all the winter attire that we learned this week as they put each item of clothing on me.  Happily, I don't have a picture of myself wearing two hats, a coat, scarf, and mittens!

Hope you all have a great weekend.  Next week we will be talking all about snowmen, and we have some really fun activities planned!