So last week we bought a printer. You may have seen I wrote about how much Oscar was loving the box? We bought it for several reasons, one being to support Oscar’s speech development, which as I’ve explained before is delayed. One of his issues is not only does it take him a long time to ‘get’ words, he seems to use them and then ‘lose’ them again. So in order to provide a visual support to the words he discovers, we decided to print images out and have them accessible to him at all times. Which is how Ben and I found ourselves hard at work with Google images and the laminator last night.
I decided to use a couple of pictures for each word, choosing a selection of drawings, illustrations and photos. I have no idea if this is the ‘right’ thing to do, but I wanted to see if he could identify each picture as the word, regardless of how they appeared. I’ve also added the actual word, not that he can read yet, but just to get him used to associating the letters with the item as he gets older. Again I have no idea if this is the ‘right’ thing to do, but it felt right to me and as such I went with it!
We put them up all around the lounge and kitchen last night and you should have seen his face this morning. It was like Christmas had come early. He ran from one picture to the next, saying the correct word in front of each. The joy was palpable, his and mine! His favourite seems to be “Fish”. We also made some animal cards, as although he hasn’t got the names down just yet, he is making the correct noises each time for Dog, Cat and Sheep.
We’ll see if this helps the words to hang around any longer and I know there are words I’ve forgotten he can say like flower and elephant, so I’ll be adding to the collection tonight as well as when he gains new words. Putting the ‘Car’ images next to the front door also gave me the idea to have a go at more directive cards, such as bed, bath, garden, food, drink that sort of thing. Not only will it encourage him to link the word with the image, but hopefully we can both use it to indicate what we want to happen (I’ll let you know how that goes!).
For now he’s happy to run up to the Fish and shout something that sounds to me like “It’s a Fish”!
And that makes me happy.