Read Across America Week
📚Happy Read Across America Week (and Happy Birthday Dr. Suess!)📚
Each year, National Read Across America Week is celebrated during the first week of March. The annual event is part of Read Across America, an initiative on reading creative by the National Education Association.
Here are some great ways to inspire reading in children:
📚 Keep books everywhere you spend time. Put them in the car, in every room of the house, and tuck them in backpacks and purses. Make them easily accessible.
📚Visit the library often. Knowing how to use the library and learning the benefits of a library fosters a love of reading as well as genuine respect for the services libraries provide.
📚Get caught reading. Children imitate what they see the adults around them do. Whether they see you read a magazine, newspaper, or novel, let them know reading is the cool thing to do.
📚Read to your children. No matter their age, reading aloud strengthens their vocabulary and language skills. It also opens up opportunities for discussion.
📚Have your children read to you, too. You never know what you might learn!
NO! AAC will not prevent, stop, or slow a child from speaking verbally, and in fact research had found it to increase overall communication skills, verbal communication, and receptive language! That’s a WIN-WIN-WIN!
There are NO prerequisites to using AAC. And a child does not have to have the ability to point, there are many ways they can access AAC including but not limited to eye gaze, partner assisted scanning, head pointing and more!
Choosing a communication app should be made on an individualized basis. It’s important to consider availability of a robust vocabulary, and individual preferences.
Therapy Putty , when utilized during Occupational Pediatric Therapy treatments, mainly works on overall hand strength, but can be adapted to work on finger strength, pinching, dexterity, cutting skills, and stereognosis (recognizing the form of an object before seeing what it is). Therapy putty comes in different resistances, listed easy to most difficult: tan, yellow, red, green, blue, and black.
Fine motor skills allow your child to make movements using the small muscles in their hand and fingers. They are an important skill for many tasks like writing, getting dressed, cutting with scissors, drawing pictures, stringing beads, stacking blocks, and more every day and play activities. Along with arm and grip strength, these skills allow your child to brush their teeth, eat independently and more. Therapy putty helps strengthen fine motor skills and hand strength so your child can complete more tasks independently!
Putty can also be used to help children focus better in the classroom and when working on homework when used as a fidget tool. It’s also a calming tool to help children refocus and self-regulate when upset.
