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Helping Your Child Develop Play Skills Playing is one of the most important things you can do with your child to help them develop. Play involves a lot of interaction and helps your child gain confidence, feel safe and loved, develop physical skills. It also enhances speech, language and communication skills. Children need time to develop play skills and playing with parents also gives children one on one attention and time they crave. As a Speech and Language Therapist, I can’t over-emphasise the importance of finding the time to play with your children on a regular basis. This can be very difficult in a busy household, with many demands, but setting aside even ten minutes would be beneficial. This can be done on a one to one basis or with others. Children also need to learn how to self-occupy and play by themselves, and you, as parents, can facilitate this. […]

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Early language development   The early years of a child’s life is considered a critical period for development. A child’s ability to speak clearly, process speech sounds, to understand what others are saying, to express ideas and interact with others, are key skills. Speech and language tend sometimes to be confused, but they are, in fact, two very distinct areas. To clarify, language is a set of shared rules that allow us to express ideas in a meaningful way. Language is divided into two areas, receptive language, which involves the ability to listen to, process and understand what is being said, and expressive language. This is the ability to put thoughts into words and sentences, in a way that makes sense and is grammatically accurate. Speech, on the other hand, gives vocal expression to language. It involves the precisely coordinated muscle actions of the tongue, lips, jaw, and vocal tract, […]

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Is your child having some difficulty developing their knowledge of body parts and general language skills? If so, then Mr Potato Head can help!   Play: It can’t be disputed that children learn best through play as language development can be supported, by adults, in a fun and natural way. Playing with Mr Potato Head can help develop symbolic play, certain language skills and support overall cognitive development. Choices: Offer your child choices of body parts when placing them into Mr Potato Head. It can support the understanding and expressive use of, vocabulary for body parts. Talk about these body parts as your child is assembling and experimenting with Mr Potato Head. Providing choices can also support a child’s ability to make decisions. Requesting: Mr Potato Head is a great tool to help support the skill of requesting. It offers many ways to develop consistent use of communication including, gestures, […]

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Would you like to support your child’s social and conversation skills? If so, Conversation Cubes could help The ability to engage in conversation and express ones’ perspective are vital skills in social communication. These colourful cubes feature 36 engaging questions and can be played by 2 people or in a larger group. They are best suited to children aged 6-10 years. Their use offers many opportunities to build listening, language and social skills. They are a supportive fun way to assist children in discussing their experiences and opinions when asked certain questions. They are a great addition to a toolkit to build confidence in conversation skills!   Written by Elaine Baldwin, Senior Speech & Language Therapist at Sensational Kids, Clonakilty   Where Can I Purchase Conversation Cubes? Conversation Cubes are available from Sensational Kids Child Development & Learning Store   Copyright Sensational Kids CLG 2018

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Avalanche Fruit Stand This is firm favourite with the kids I see in occupational therapy. They love the challenge to the game. It’s great to work on turn taking. It can also be used for bilateral hand use as they need to hold the card steady when they are turning the spinner. The tweezers encourage a pincer grasp with the grooves for finger and thumb placement and they are firm enough that children need to use strengthening force to close the tweezer around the fruit. This is a great game for working on problem solving skills as the child needs to figure out how to get the fruit out without dropping other pieces of fruit. I like to use the rule that they can’t take fruit from the top. This is a great all-rounder of a game for fine motor skill development.     Written By: Amanda Kelly, Senior Occupational […]

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I love using the Putty Peeps UV in my occupational therapy sessions. It provides tactile input for children who see this and can help to regulate them with resistance as they are moulding the putty to turn it into a person. The set comes with eyes but you can add more pieces like legs and arms and encourage the child to use their imagination. The UV light is great for improving Fine motor strength and endurance and the child uses a pincer grip to push down the button and needs to hold this to keep the light on. I also use this to help with handwriting in sessions. We flatten out the putty, which is fine motor work, and then we draw letters or numbers in the putty with the light. You need to manipulate the putty again to get it back to white. This gives a break from too […]

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One of the first things Occupational Therapists look at when they see someone writing is their pencil grasp. This becomes automatic and we frequently find ourselves assessing the pencil grasp of the lady behind the counter in the bank or the person taking our order at a restaurant. The reason that this become so engrained in the minds of Occupational Therapists is that when we see a child for handwriting difficulties one of the first things we need to look at is how they are holding their pencil and how this is affecting their writing. There are many different ways that we hold our pencils, some of these work well for us and others impact significantly on the legibility and pace of our writing or the amount of writing we can do before it becomes painful. The most common pencil grasps are the Tripod and Quadropod grasp (See Below). Until […]

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