Saturday 10 January 2015

Speech therapy

This stay brought about a revelation that the illustrationg by Mauri Kunnas are an excellent aid in the speech therapy exercises we try to do with him. They help to discuss what different characters are doing and get Number One Son to learn new verbs and try to establish who is a 'he' and who is a 'she'. Sadly, the gendered English pronouns mean that all examples are selected on the basis of their traditional gender characteristics. This leads to stereotyping, but you have to give clear examples to a little boy a little behind his peers. His understanding of abstract concepts is not great, so in these exercises a 'shirt' equals a 'woman' and a 'tie' equals a 'man'.

Another revelation are the endless toy videos on YouTube. And the videos about the Minecraft game. Number One Son is happily building his own worlds and apparently using the tips from the YouTube. This shows that he has developed a more acute sense of grasping details from around him, but a school task about materials suggested that his visual understanding is much better than his oral. A longer sentence does not yet make sense.

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