Last week we finally discovered why Alex has been having such a hard time articulating certain letters. As I had mentioned before he is in speech therapy. After a month of therapy with a very inexperienced speech therapist, I switched him to another. She is great! Alex likes to go to speech now. She incorporates therapy in play and recognized that he he weak facial muscles. She asked another therapist that specializes in oral motor problems to come to one of his appointments. The second she saw him she knew that he had very low facial muscle tone, which was preventing him from forming his mouth to say certain letters. Turns out is all stems back from him being born a couple weeks early, at 38 weeks. Muscle tone develops in the last couple weeks of pregnancy and starts at the feet going up. So we have to do activities to exercise his facial muscles, and eventually he should be able to articulate letter sounds correctly. Blowing bubbles is one of his exercises. So I found a recipe and made some bubble solution.
I couldn't get any photos of him trying to blow the bubbles. After a while he just wanted to wave the wand and let the wind create the bubbles.
Here is the recipe that I used to make the bubble solution. It worked pretty well, and made some big bubbles. We just filled up some old bubble containers and used some wands we already had.
1/2 cup of dishwashing liquid
2 cups of water
2 teaspoons of corn syrup
As a kid, I had a wand set that allowed me to make the large bubbles (until someone broke it). THAT was the bomb.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that your son has a good speech therapist now...that can make all the difference in the world.
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