September - "Babies and Bedtime"

New theme... new decor. They changed the entire "theme" room to make like a baby nursery. Lots of babies, bath stuff, changing area etc. Every day for school, we get sent home a daily sheet of her activities, snack she ate and her diaper information. (and when we are ready to potty train, they will work on that with her there.) I like the information I get sent home and know what she did each morning.

Each Monday, I meet with Natalie's speech therapist, Megan for 30-45 minutes before picking up Natalie from school. We talk about the previous week and their daily sessions and what they are working on. We then talk about stuff we can work on at home in conjunction with school stuff. They work on about 8-10 new words each week and review them from previous weeks. (I will be posting some videos of her language very soon.) They work on 4 areas: Auditory Training (picking out the 6 LING sounds "ah, ee, mm, ss, sh, oo" and identifying words with different syllables, Receptive Vocabulary (saying and understanding new words) , Language (practicing noun-verb sentences) and Language Experience (practicing with other kids or in small groups.)

Speech Therapy Highlights for September:

-This was a good first few weeks that Megan could see which words Natalie already knew and which ones she needed to work on.
-They worked really hard on noun-verb sentences and then moved on to (SVO) Subject-Verb-Object sentences. "Sophie eats the cereal."
-practice imitating sentences
-identifying 4 two syllable words with the same stress "airplane, hotdog, ice cream" and 8 one syllable words with differing sounds "bear, hat, shoe.."
- they worked a lot on the phrase "I want..."  (she has that one down now for sure!)

The Baby theme
they just get cute wrapping paper and cover some of the walls... such a good idea

Highlights of September:
-running in the gym for recess
-playing with Mac in the baby area
-playing in the tree area
- washing the baby with bubbles
- fingerpainting
-sorting shampoos and soaps
- rocking on the rocking horse

practicing sorting stuff

(taken from their classroom blog)

 Over the last few weeks, we spent a lot of time in the toddler bedroom.  Although we didn't actually go to sleep, we were very good at turning out the lights, tucking our friends into bed and singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star"to them as they took a rest.  We practiced saying, "Time for bed," "Goodnight or Night Night" and of course, "Wake up!"  

After the toddlers realized that they didn't really have to go to sleep, they had a lot of fun with the Bedtime Routine.  :)  It was so fun to see the expressions on their faces as they pretended to sleep.  They especially enjoyed using flashlights to make their stars shine bright!

This month, the theme room was decorated like a nursery and filled with a lot of babies that demanded our attention!  The babies cried "Wah, Wah" because they were hungry, tired or even if they had a dirty diaper.  We bathed the babies in warm and cold water.  We dressed our babies and even changed their dirty diapers!  Lastly, we gave our babies a bottle as we rocked them to sleep and put them to bed in their cribs.

Our favorite activities of the month were taking our babies for a walk, driving our babies in the car and believe it or not, changing their diapers!  The toddlers also loved participating in our literacy circle by making the babies say, "Wah, wah, wah," "Goo, Goo," "Clap, clap, clap" "Night, night" and "Bye, Bye."

Our books of the month were "Goodnight Moon," and "The Napping House."   We sang "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and "Rock a Bye Baby." Try reading these books or singing these songs at home.  I am very familiar with them.  

this was fun for Natalie

Megan (Nat's speech therapist) told me that Natalie wasn't too fond of this months theme. I wasn't totally surprised. She doesn't really play with baby dolls at home much (neither did Sophie) although we have all the dolls and accessories. She did have fun playing and washing the pretend babies though. This was a big hit every day.

They played "dress-up" by putting on pajamas and doing a bedtime routine. They each have their own tooth brush at school and they pretend to brush their teeth there too.

At the end of this month I got to go see their theme with the other parents. Sophie had fun tagging along. She wishes all the time she had cochlear implants so she could go to Natalie's school. :)