{Guest Post} Cooking Alphabet Soup

I am thrilled to be guest posting here on MahliMoo, Me and Three today. My name is Deirdre Smith and I am visiting from my blog JDaniel4’s Mom. My blog is about raising a very inquisitive four year old boy, the adventures we have, the special meals we create, the crafts we create, and the learning we do.

While Amy usually shares wonderful recipes that you can prepared to share at a family meal, I hope you won’t mind my sharing a recipe of cooking up a wonderful learning activity called Cooking Alphabet Soup.

Like most soup recipes this recipe starts with a large soup pot, a lot of water and, a ladle to stir the ingredients. Unlike regular soup recipes this one calls for foam alphabet letters and plastic or rubber treasures that will match up with the letters you put into the pot.


Here are the directions for the soup game:

-Dump all of your plastic and rubber treasure into the pot of water.

-Dump in foam letters that will match the treasures into the pot of water.

-Stir the objects up with a large ladle.

-Have your child scoop up an object for the pot with the ladle.

-Identify the object name of the letter or treasure..

-Identify the sound the letter makes if it is a letter or the sound the treasure begins with.

-Search the pot for the letter or object that will match the first object you scooped out.

-Start a line up of the letters and matching object on the ground or table top.

-Continue the process until all the letters and objects are matched up.

　

If your child gets frustrated with not finding a match quickly or the game seems to be taking to long, you can just have your child scoop out all the objects in the pot and line them with their matches all up at the same time.

The idea of the game is to have fun working with letters if the game stops being fun you can always just play with the objects in the pot. Your child can just scoop them up and plop them back into the pot.

After twenty years as a elementary school and technology resource teacher in Northern Virginia, Deirdre Smith became a stay at home mom in upstate South Carolina. She and her husband are the proud parents of J. Daniel the 4th and the blog is named for him. Deirdre can also be found on twitter as @jdaniel4smom and on her blog's FB page

Kids, Speech and Learning

Over the Christmas break Caden developed a bit of a stutter and was straining to start his sentences. Umming was also a prevalent feature in his vocabulary.

He has also had some trouble with pronunciations of some words but never to the extent that we were faced with during December and January. Since starting school we have seen some improvement in both the stuttering and the pronunciations of his words and he has been doing really well.

After speaking with several people in the know, his stuttering has now been put down to nerves about starting school. But that hasn't stopped us from working with him on a daily basis to aide his speech.

Here are a few things we have been doing:

Singing Nursery Rhymes- Many nursery rhymes feature heavily on repetition. This helps by getting children familiar with the sounds of the letters and also how the sounds feel when they are saying them. 
For example the Peter Piper nursery rhyme is a favourite around here and it focuses heavily on the p and the k sounds which both use different parts of the mouth and tongue to say them. You will find the same thing happening in many nursery rhymes.
Reading- Simply reading to children helps aide in speech and development. This was a key thing both his teacher and our doctor wanted us to focus on.  
Sing-a-longs- Do you remember the song Skip to My Lou? Well it is a great one for kids to use to learn the letters of the alphabet and also the sounds they make. I know Caden has fun singing this one.


Something we have tried to steer clear of was anything to structured and just tried to incorporate it into our daily life. So no flash cards etc.


Please remember that I am in no way a expert. I am just a parent who has found these things helpful when working with my son.

If you are looking for some tips from someone who knows what they are doing then I can recommend here. I only recently found this blog and I only wish I found it sooner.

Do any of your children have trouble with their speech? What have you found has helped them?