A Week with Wade: Friday

On Friday, Wade has no school or therapy.  So it's Mommy Time all day.  Hurrah!

The activities we do reinforce his therapy goals and also introduce other skills he is ready to try.

He can work on many of his goals just by helping me around the house:  following directions, understanding prepositions, learning sequencing of events, and talking about whatever we are doing.

So Wade happily helps to empty the trash, unload the dishwasher, set the table, put away his clothes, and run all kinds of errands.

He does a pretty good job of dressing himself with a little assistance.  Buttons are still difficult.

Each day, we talk about the month, the day, and the weather (printables from Sparklebox).

 Recently Wade has become very interested in time, so I introduced the clock to him with flashcards. Issues relating to time can sometimes be difficult for children with Down syndrome.  Five minutes might be an hour or an hour might be 5 minutes.  So I decided to seize this window of opportunity and introduce time early while he is interested in it.  If talking about clocks and pointing out daily schedules helps his sense of time to develop, then that's great.  If not, we haven't lost anything by learning about something he enjoys.  At the very least, he'll be able to read the time, and that will give him a sense of accomplishment.

(Have you ever thought of what a heavenly concept it is to have no sense of time?  At the end of time when "time shall be no more" we will all attain the ability to have no sense of time.  Won't that be nice?)  

I like these printable play dough mats from Childcareland.

I've been working with him on the skill of spotting, or being able to recognize how many items there are without actually counting each item.  These printable flashcards from Teaching Math to People with Down Syndrome are ideal for this.

These puzzles are great for working on cardinality (last number counted is the total).

We've also been working on reading the numbers from 1 to 100 (chart from Sparklebox).

Wade loves using this skip counter from The Toymaker.  You insert the number strip into the counter and then move the strip up as he counts so only the current number is visible in the round circle.

Then we practice skip counting again using actual money.  He was already introduced to skip counting and counting money on More Starfall, so again I'm just building on his current interests.

Music is a great part of Wade's day.  Today he was enjoying his cd a bit too loud and I told him to turn it down.  A while later I began vacuuming in the living room where he was still singing along with the music. Pretty soon, I noticed him behind me with his hands over his ears frowning at the vacuum cleaner and saying, "Too loud!!"

It totally made my day!