Navigating the Playground with a 2-Year-Old

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Summer is a great time to explore the playground with your child. Playgrounds provide a fun and exciting playground with toddlerenvironment that gets your child outside and active. Children of all ages can enjoy a playground in many different ways.

Read on for specific tips to navigating the playground with a two-year-old:

  • Choose the right time of day to play.  Pick a time of day when peers of a similar age will be at the park. Older kids play differently, and it’s best to have your little one playing with children his own age.
  • Climb the stairs and uneven surfaces. A two-year-old is expected to be able to climb stairs independently and walk over uneven surfaces without losing balance. The park is a great place to practice these skills. If your toddler is a little unsteady on the wobbly bridge, hold their hand to increase confidence.
  • Go down the slide. Depending on your toddler’s confidence and the size of the slide, you can either hold them on the way down, or let them slide down by themselves. Many parks have smaller slides that are good for beginners.
  • Play in the sand. This will help to develop your toddler’s fine motor skills and tactile sensory processing. If you can, try and build a castle or mountain to help develop spatial skills.
  • Ride the spring-animals (the kind you sit on that wobble). This will help improve your child’s balance and strength while having fun!

Parks are a great environment to encourage your kids to get outside and play. In addition to the benefits mentioned above, playgrounds help to foster social skills, build friendships, and support a healthy lifestyle.

The Importance of Swimming Skills

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Swimming was always one of my favorite activities as a child, which is why so many of my childhood memories from mysummer swimming chicago summers off of school take place at the neighborhood pool or at one of Chicago’s beautiful beaches. Aside from the fact that spending a day at the pool is a fun way to pass the hot days of summer, swimming has many other benefits for your child’s development. Below is a list of the top reasons why learning to swim is so important for your child.

Reasons Swimming Skills are Critical for your Child:

  • Strengthening: Negotiating the water requires your child to use all of her muscles. From her core to her arms and legs, your kid will become stronger while playing against the resistance provided by the water.
  • Coordination: Swimming requires a lot of coordination! While each swimming stroke is different, they all require simultaneous movement from your child’s arms and legs in different directions. As your child learns how to swim using a variety of swimming strokes, she is learning how to coordinate multiple movements from multiple body parts at the same time.
  • Sensory input: Swimming is a great way to get a lot of sensory input. The water itself provides deep pressure input to the whole body. The constant sensation of the water can help to decrease tactile sensitivity that your child may experience out of the water. The water also provides proprioceptive input to the body, which can help your child’s body awareness and the body’s position in space. Lastly, the changing position of your child’s head that is required with swimming provides vestibular input, which will help your child strengthen that sensory input both in and out of the water.
  • Safety: Being able to negotiate the water safely is an extremely important skill for your child to learn. While you can never predict what situation your child may encounter in the water, being able to swim, as well as being able to tread water, is the best way for your child to be prepared in challenging and potentially unsafe  water situations. However, it should be emphasized that no matter how strong of a swimmer your child is, all swimming and play activities around the water should be supervised by an adult.

Happy swimming this summer!

3 Outdoor Activities to Promote Speech & Language Development

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Summer is finally here!  Take advantage of this time of year, and enjoy the time outdoors with your child with these 3 speech and languageeasy activities to promote speech and language skills outside.  Remember, learning and development don’t always happen at the table.  In fact, learning and development are often best accomplished in the context of engaging play and multi-sensory activities.  So take the learning outdoors and enjoy spending time with your child in the summer sun!

Outdoor Speech and Language Activities:

  1. Plan a nature scavenger hunt.  Write 10 clues on a brown paper bag (or present the clues verbally if your child is not yet reading), and encourage your child to find each of the 10 items.  For example, a clue might be “I am green, and I grow in the ground” or “I am all different colors, and I smell very good.”  If you live in the city and have limited access to nature items, use a digital camera to capture items on the list.  This activity promotes reading, listening, categorization, and memory. Read more

Fun, Free Father’s Day Activities

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With Father’s Day right around the corner, it’s time to think about how the kids can celebrate that great guy in their lives: Dad.  For those of you looking to honor Dad without breaking the bank, consider these  fun, free and meaningful activities that kids and dads can do together this Father’s Day.

Fun, Free Father’s Day Activities:

Create a family picture train.  Many fathers find themselves with a little train lover or two in the house.  Build on thisFun Free Father's Day Activities passion by creating a family picture train.  Cut out rectangles from paper and decorate as rail cars.  Cut smaller circles and add for wheels.  Then, find family pictures that are special and glue them onto each train car.  Connect the train cars with yarn or paper.

Bake.  Whether Dad dons the chef’s hat in the family regularly or not, Father’s Day is a great day to choose a recipe and dig in to creating something tasty to eat.  Kids can do the measuring, adding and tasting.

Take a nature walk.  Dad and the kids can take a walk down the street or around the backyard in search of interesting natural items.  Collect these to take home and create a collage or a terrarium.  If you’re in an urban area, head to an area park.

Create caricatures.  Put the family’s art skills to work and have each family member draw a funny picture of Dad or each other.

Do yoga. There are many resources for family yoga online such as rainbow kids yoga.  Take a look at fun poses that dads and kids can do together for fun and fitness.

Have a great Father’s Day and enjoy the special man in your life!

5 Healthy Summer Habits for Your Family

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Summer is a perfect time to focus on getting healthy, especially for kids. Read this list for healthy ideas for your family that take little effort and can make a big difference.

5 Tips for a Healthy Family This Summer:

  1. Buy healthy food that’s in season. During the summer, there are plenty of healthy foods available in the store and at the farmer’s markets. Take advantage of this abundance of produce and give your kids fruit at meals and for snacks instead of packaged foods. Make salads a staple for lunch or dinner. Use fresh, cool vegetables that taste great on hot days such as cucumbers, celery, bell peppers, and spinach leaves. Mix it up and make summery green salads with fruit accents, such as spinach tossed with strawberries, blueberries, or grapes. Read more

The Educational Benefits of Playing with Blocks

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Are old fashioned blocks boring or beneficial?  With all of the technology children have access to today, sometimes blocks can seem, well, boring.  However, don’t underestimate this age-old toy.  Blocks remain one of the most important toys for children to use in order to develop critical skills for school and for life. 

Through block play, children learn the following skills:children learning through block play

Science Concepts: Children learn science when they experience gravity as their constructions fall. They also learn the use of simple machines as they build ramps to their buildings.

Spatial Reasoning: Young designers learn to manipulate space and objects through block play.  Will this fit here?  Will this fall down?  Will this make the shape I want?  Block play allows children to explore navigation of space and direction.

Math Concepts: Some of the math skills encountered through block play include counting, comparison of length and width, names of shapes and how to combine certain geometric shapes to make other shapes.  Children are even learning the basics of addition when they discover that two short blocks will be the same size as another block.

Reading and Writing Skills: Through block play, children understand the importance of sequence, an important early reading skill, as they retell Read more

Skills Addressed When Making Paper Snowflakes

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Even though the holidays are over, there are plenty of winter projects that you can create with your children at home! I always like to snow flake projectremind parents that there are numerous activities that you likely participate in at home already that incorporate a variety of age-appropriate skills and help your child grow and learn. One such activity is making paper snowflakes. Paper snowflakes can be as simple or as complex as you would like them to be and will certainly make your house appear to be more festive this winter!

Paper Snowflakes

Materials: paper (colored or plain), scissors, pencil, decorations (e.g. sequence, glitter, markers) and a hole puncher. Use string if you want to hang them like garland.

Directions:

  1. Fold the paper at least 2 times (e.g. in half and in half again)
  2. Use a pencil to draw out particular shapes if you have a design in mind
  3. Cut out various shapes from the creased sides of the paper
  4. Open up the folded paper to see your snowflake
  5. Add decorations as you like and/or punch a hole in the top and hang from string like garland

Skills Addressed:

  • Folding paper- The child has to line up the edges and produce a crease
  • Cutting- The child has to manipulate his scissors to cut out various shapes within the folded paper (which also addresses hand strength)
  • Bilateral skills- The child has to hold and turn the paper in one hand and manipulate the scissors with the other hand
  • Visual Motor skills- The child must be able to visualize how many shapes are able to fit within the crease of the paper and if the scissors will be able to fit to successfully cut out the shapes
  • Creativity- The child has the chance to use his/her imagination to make his snowflake look however he would like it to look. Encourage your child to be as unique and individualized as possible- there is not a ‘correct’ way when making crafts!

As you can see, crafts provide more than just a ‘time-filler’ for you children! Crafts help to address fine motor skills, visual motor skills and direction-following. Try using a theme or a topic of interest for your child and watch his imagination take flight! Feel free to reach out to your child’s teacher or occupational therapist if you have any questions or concerns that are related to your child’s fine motor or visual motor skills.

Providing Communicative Temptations in the Home for Late Talkers

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Is your toddler not talking as much as he or she should be? Don’t panic! Below are some strategies for creating opportunities for patty cakevocalizations. Remember, ALWAYS reward your child with the toy immediately after they attempt to say the target!

5 Strategies To Get Your Late Talker To Communicate:

  1. Leave a desired food item that is just out of reach of the child, but within their eyesight. Food is one of the BEST motivators for communication. If you’re just starting out with therapy, try to make mealtimes as the time you look for opportunities to encourage communication with your child.
  2. Engage in a favorite social game (i.e. tickle time, peek-a-boo or patty-cake) with your child for one or two turns then stop and look expectantly at the child. If they need a prompt to ask you to continue, go ahead and give it! Try to stop a few times and see if your child is able to request to continue the game spontaneously.
  3. Bubbles are your new best friend! Open a jar, blow some and then close the jar. Hand the jar to the child and wait.
  4. Place a toy in a clear plastic container with a lid and give it to your child. Allow them to be curious for a minute, then ask “Do you need help?” If they respond with yes, model “Help me”. Repeat until they can request help on their own! This also works well with closed doors that toddlers are not able to open without an adult!
  5. Use a slinky or toy microphone for fun vocal play. Take a turn and model either a silly, extended sound or an appropriate language model, then offer the child a turn. You can play with volume, pitch or rate of speech!

Happy Talking!

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Educational Graduate Gifts At Each Age

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It’s that time of year!  Children are graduating and proud parents are celebrating this milestone.  Read on for special gift suggestions for graduates of all ages that also have educational value.

Educational and Fun Gifts for Your Grad By Age:

Kindergarten Graduation Gifts:

  • Special Books: Classic, hard-cover books will be fun to read in the moment and treasured as a keepsake for years to come.  Consider titles like Ferdinand, The Tale of Peter Rabbit or Paddington Bear.
  • Magna-Tiles: Consider investing in a set of Magna-Tiles.  These magnetic building tiles will occupy the imagination of your soon-to-be first grader for hours on a rainy day over the summer.
  • Lego Building Blocks: Legos have been around for a long time and for good reason.  Lego building sets engage young builders as they create predetermined buildings or design their own.

Junior High Graduation Gifts:

  • Special Books: Inspire your soon to be high school kid with a copy of Oh the Place You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss.
  • Educational Video Games:  You can’t tear your teen away from the Xbox360 or Wii, but at least you can inspire them with a game that will teach something.  Consider Civilization Revolution (Xbox360) or The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii).

High School Graduation Gifts:

Graduation is a wonderful accomplishment.  Celebrate your children with gifts that will continue to enrich them as they move to the next phase of  life!

How to Treat Twins as Individuals

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In general, parents that have twins are very concerned with treating their children equally, but they often struggle in allowing their twinschildren to find their own identity. Parents usually dress twins in matching outfits, sign them up for the same activities, purchase two of the same toy and even arrange play dates to be together.

In order to make sure that you treat your twins as individuals, try keeping the following tips in mind:

  • Clothes: Clothing reveals a lot about an individual and it is a way that people tend to show their creativity and identity. Do not feel obligated to dress your twins in identical outfits. Choosing clothes that differ in color will allow your child’s personality to show itself. When your children get older have them help pick out their outfits and dress in the clothes that they truly like.
  • Activities: If one twin is enrolled in dance, it does not imply that the other child should do the same. Make sure that the activities your twins are enrolled in reveal their personal skills and interests. Although this may require you to drive around more often, your children will be Read more