Therapy Everyday?

One of my parents said to me "my daughter's friend gets therapy everyday". She was referring to actual therapies-speech, OT, PT, Music, Developmental, etc. But before she expanded I thought she meant that the parent focused on providing a language rich environment everyday. As a parent you are the best teacher of your child. YOU are with them everyday for more hours than anyone else. Speech therapy and other therapies are great. But unless YOU are working with them daily, hourly and by the minute you aren't going to see significant changes nearly as fast as you would like. Making your moments with your child purposeful can create the most amount of change possible. I'm not saying you need to be doing worksheets all day or drilling speech sounds. I just mean that it's good to make ordinary moments, teaching moments.


For example:

If your making lunch, talk about what your doing, sequence the steps out loud, have your child help to the best of their ability.

If your doing laundry, talk about the laundry detergent, tell them it's the soap that washes the clothes and makes them clean, like you wash them with soap in the bath tub. Have them help seperate the clothes, lights and darks. Talk about how the washer makes them wet and the dryer dries them.

And as we all know, if your the passenger in the car you don't really remember how to get there! So make your child the driver during these situations once they have some understanding of what your doing. Have them spread the butter, have them seperate the clothes. Just watching you isn't going to create the same knowledge base that DOING will!

These things might seem so simple or silly or things everyone knows. But you wouldn't believe how many students I worked with in the schools that had no idea what laundry detergent was. Could not tell me the steps to making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.