Little Peach Feeding and Speech

Summer Speech

6/6/2022

School’s out for summer!

With school out and summer in, you might be wondering about activities to build your child’s speech and language skills at home or on vacation.

Here are THREE easy and fun activities to engage your child in with minimal to NO-PREP!

1. BUBBLES! As a speech pathologist, bubbles are a must. So many language goals can be targeted with bubbles whether at home, the beach, or the lake. Target utterance expansion by modeling “more bubbles”, “Let’s get more bubbles”, “small bubble”, “big bubble”. Target verbs while popping, stomping, blowing, or catching bubbles. So many great ideas for bubbles!

2. iSpy! This is a great activity to do outside, in the car, at home, or anywhere. Describe items to see if your child can guess that item and vice versa. If your child can guess the category of the item if that is one of their goals (ex. ‘iSpy something with four wheels and drives. Do you think that it’s a vehicle, food, or clothing?”) It’s also great for children working on/s/ and /s/-blends like spy, sky, or “I see something _____.”

3. Scavenger hunts! This is a fun and engaging activity that allows the child to move while targeting their goals. Easily target following directions like “Look behind the couch and then in the bathroom” or give them clues on the next room by having your child answer wh- questions for the home (ex. “Where do you make food?” “What do you use to brush your teeth?”) If your child is working on specific speech sounds, ask your speech pathologist for articulation cards to hide around the house to find and practice!

If you plan on going out of town but would like additional resources to practice while gone, please ask your speech-language pathologist for additional resources or ideas!

Allison Galle Norris, M.S., CCC-SLP
Speech-Language Pathologist

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Spring Break Book Ideas

3/11/2020

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Spring break is upon us, and we’ve been getting some nice weather in between the rainy days here in central Alabama! We are getting ready to celebrate all that spring brings with it. One of our favorite holidays, Read Across America Day, encourages us to continue the celebration of our love of reading every day. That’s one of the reasons why we love gifting books to our friends and family for holidays and birthdays.

Books serve multiple purposes here at Little Peach. We love all of the language exposure and the quality snuggles reading time provides. There are tons of great books out there, and sometimes the huge amount can be overwhelming. So here’s a list of my top 10 favorite books and series that why we love incorporating into our family reading time.

Priddy Baby Books – Theses books are amazing at exposing our children to a lot of vocabulary. One thing I really love is that the pages are broken down into categories. It really helps to introduce the concept of categories to little ones. Additionally, this book uses real pictures! This is so great as it helps our children carry over the names of the pictures into real life every day items/objects.

Llama Llama series by Anna Dewdney – This series is great as it lets you accompany little llama on some very fun daily events like the first day of school and bedtime. Great for prepping little ones for events that can otherwise be overwhelming.

Usborne Books and More – Touchy Feely Books – These books are great for little ones to encourage understanding of different textures and description words. We also love searching for the little duck hidden on each page. It makes for some very fun reading times.

Tom Fletcher “There’s a ___ in your book” – This series is one of my twins’ favorites. These books are great because they are interactive, and allow the reader to follow along and take part in the story. How neat is that?

Dr. Seuss – Any of the Dr. Seuss books are always a great option. Fun stories and engaging pictures for children and rhythmic text make these a great choice.

Eric Carle – “Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you see?” has to be the most read book in our house. Any of the Eric Carle books are great because they have engaging pictures and eye catching stories. These classic books are always a great option.

Laura Numeroff Mouse board books – These are a great option that we love for holidays. There are a lot of holiday specific mouse books and most of them come in a board book option for durability. We also love the repetitive sequence of the stories it makes it easier for our kiddos to read the books with us if they can predict how the next page is going to go.

Press Here by Hervé Tullet – This book is also interactive and super engaging for littles. Each page has a direction to follow and allows young readers to get involved in the book.

Any nursery rhyme book – These are great as they help children put a visual picture to songs that are easily remembered. Nursery rhymes have many benefits for preschool development, skills such as discriminating between sounds and increasing vocabulary. They’re also great at introducing patterns, sequencing, and counting. (Ex. Wheels on the Bus, Old McDonald)

Lift the flap books – Usborne Books and more, Target, Amazon have a huge range of lift the flap books. These are some of the best because lifting flaps allow children to have an additional engaging element, and they are fun for all!

This is a short list of all the books we use with our kids during story time and also to encourage language and preschool skills. There are so many more books and series out there that we love and have in our libraries!

We’d love to hear if you have any favorite book/series we didn’t include? Let us know in the comments!

Martha Verbruggen, M.S. CCC-SLP

Martha is a bilingual speech-language pathologist with Little Peach Feeding and Speech. She is a mother of toddler boy/girl twins and a baby girl.

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Picky Eating: Normal or Disordered

7/15/2019

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If you wonder if your child is just a typical picky eater or if there's something more serious going on, watch this video by Melanie Potock CCC-SLP, a feeding specialist and speech-language pathologist. Melanie shares that 25% of typically developing children have a feeding disorder, while 80% of children with developmental disabilities will have a feeding disorder. If you believe your child may have a feeding disorder and you are living in the Prattville, Alabama area, call to schedule an evaluation by our feeding specialist and speech-language pathologist, Laura Hall CCC-SLP.

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5 Toys To Help Elicit Language - Toddler edition

6/26/2019

6 Comments

Becoming an SLP has done something to me - I am slightly obsessed with toys. There is something about seeing a child's face when tinkering with a toy: you might see concentration, awe, joy, and occasionally disinterest. It's important to remember that it's much less about finding the one magical toy that can increase your child's language and much more about finding a toy that you can use TOGETHER to grow the language. Language is all about interactions between people, and that's how children learn best! To avoid the trial-and-error of finding the right toy to play with your late talker, here are my favorites that you may strike gold with as well!

Battat Pound and Roll

#1. In my experience, this ball tower toy (and those like it, I believe Melissa and Doug have one, but I haven't personally tried it) is SUCH a favorite with the little ones. You can practice several different tasks with this toy, requesting, following simple directions, color identification/matching, imitating actions, imitating sounds, imitating exclamatory words...the list goes on and on! Because the balls travel down the ramp when pushed through, it provides a lot of visual interest as well.

Shape Sorter

#2. Shape sorters are great for the 1-3 age group. You can work on skills like matching, color and shape identification, directional words like "in", "out", "turn," etc. You can talk about concepts like "oops! Doesn't fit, try it again!" Similar to the ball and hammer toy, you can work on requesting, following simple directions, answering yes/no questions. This one is especially great to help your little ones gain some patience with tasks. You can help them as needed, slowly giving them more and more time to figure it out before you jump in to help.

Gazillian Bubbles

#3. These are the best bubbles of all time. Seriously, they are beautiful, thick, resilient bubbles (but not to resilient). They work great in bubble machines and bubble guns, and even just the old fashion way with the included wand. The bubbles linked here come in a 2 liter container, which is pretty important if you go through bubbles like I do! To help elicit language, bubbles are great for requesting, imitative words like "pop!" Exclamations like "wow!" and "oops!" Even the most disengaged of little ones are fascinated by bubbles. It can also be good oral motor practice to round lips and blow through the wand!

Piggy Bank

#4. This toy is great because of its simplicity, and you could really use any similar toy to serve this purpose - as long as toddlers can put things IN and take things OUT. You can hide the coins around the room and talk about how you're looking, walking, etc. You can dramatically say "I found it!" when you spot a coin, and then run back to the pig to put them inside. So many verbs and prepositions can be modeled to your little one through a toy like this. Placing the coin in the bank and the subsequent sounds/singing that occurs will act as motivators to the child, while everything they do to get the coins can be the language part of the activity. Remember - it's less about what the TOY DOES, and much more about what you DO WITH the toy together!

Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? Book

#5. For our final toy, I have chosen a book. I know what you're thinking: "hey, that's not a toy, it's a book!" but I would argue that it's important to have developmentally appropriate books accessible during play time, so that makes it a toy in my mind. Books help to develop language too, ya know! This one specifically is great because of all the noises throughout the story. In this book, we learn all about what noises Mr. Brown is capable of, which can lead to some great imitation of sounds, which is an important step in language development. Encourage your child to "mooooooo!" like Mr. Brown can. Make it fun and silly!

Those were my Top 5 Toddler Toys for eliciting language. Remember - it's all about enjoying these toys and experiences together!

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Summer Speech

Spring Break Book Ideas

Martha Verbruggen, M.S. CCC-SLP

Picky Eating: Normal or Disordered

5 Toys To Help Elicit Language - Toddler edition

Battat Pound and Roll

Shape Sorter

Gazillian Bubbles

Piggy Bank

Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? Book

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