Speech and Disney Learning

Well Seth has been busy busy playing his computer cool school and watching his letter factory dvd. It has paid off (I will talk more about that in a bit). We have started some basic handwriting lessons because he has been begging me to do school with him. I don't want to get too involved with something since Alyssa is due to arrive in about 3 to 4 weeks at the latest. But he is learning and he is enjoying it and that's all that matters.

Speech
It seems that Seth may have a bit of a speech problem...not too much to worry about...probably more lazy speech than anything else. He had is 4 year check up the first of this week and we talked about it a bit with the dr. She said that the only thing that brings question to her mind is the fact there are times when we don't understand what he is saying and he has to repeat himself several times before we get it. She said that kids typically should be past this by age 4. She said that it may be time for a speech evaluation. The good thing is that the school district that you are zoned for are suppose to offer it free of charge, no matter whether or not your child attends school there. (the only thing that bothers me there is the fact that I had to take speech as a child but when my family moved to a new town that had a small school district they only offered it to special ed students). And school is fixing to be let out for the year and most districts do not offer it during the summertime.

So my husband and I decided that it is not so big a deal that we can't wait until the fall. I am hoping to be able to work with him enough and get him to a point where hopefully we won't have to take that route at all.

So today I sat Seth down and did an evaluation school lesson. I used my resources from my Hooked on Phonics curriculum (that I can't wait to start in the fall!!!). First I took the alphabet cards and shuffled them up and then showed them to Seth to make sure he can recognize his upper and lowercase letters...he did a great job! He knew 100% of his upper case letters. On his lowercase letters he got the b and d mixed up and the p and q mixed up (which I am sure is probably normal for this age) but I now know that we need to concentrate on this a little more and I need to come up with some activities to help distinguish between those letters.

We then went through the alphabet again and I had him give me the sound of each letter. This is where the Leap Frog Letter Factory DVD paid off!! He knew 100% of his letter sounds!!! Also through this activity I realized that as far as speech...he doesn't have a problem with single letter sounds...he can say them all.

The other part of that activity was to say a word that begins with the letter sound and through this I realized Seth's speech problem is his ending sounds. He does well on words that end in x (as in fox), s (as in dress), and m (as in gum). But he is having problems with words ending in g (as in dog), t (as in cat), p (as in mop), n (as in sun), d (as in mad), b (as in job) and k (as in yak, back).

He also has some problem with words with multiple syllables...the middle syllables are lazy...but we will tackle that after we do the word ending sounds.

So now I am on a mission to find activities that I can do with him that will help him with these ending sounds. I really feel like if I get serious with working with him on this we may be able to avoid the speech therapist all together.

I also welcome any advice anyone has on this and I will of course keep you updated as speech will become one of the subjects of our pre-k year.

Disney Learning
My very sweet hubby took me to Fry's the other night. He had seen there that they had a whole bunch of educational pc games and activities and thought that I would like to look through them and see if there would be anything that would be helpful for Seth...especially through the transition time with the baby. (Isn't he thoughtful??) They sure did have a BUNCH to choose from!!! The kind of person I am I wanted to buy them all!! But we finally settled on the Disney Learning System. From what I could read on the box it looked like it offered a wide range of learning skills through activities that looked like Seth would enjoy. Plus it was a very good price. We ended up buying the Preschool, Kindergartern and First and Second Grade sets! I have already sat down and really looked at them and I am impressed.

I am fixing to get Seth set up with the Preschool set and hopefully he will enjoy it enough that he will be satisfied with this as "school" while I am getting used to the new baby. The games are progressive, where you have to finish one round before you can go to the next and there are parent sections that show the progress that your child is making! I am hoping this will be a lot of fun for Seth!

As always, things are fun fun fun around here!