by admin | Oct 4, 2016 | news
Many times parents worry about making large investments and what they need to help their children is almost always within reach. Here are 5 basic things you need to have at home to help your son or daughter.
- Toys with noise: Young children are easily distracted and have little attention span. Having a rattle, whistle, or rope toy on hand can immediately bring the child back to the activity. Families can even make one with a can and dried beans.
- Bubbles: They are very useful for working petitions, taking turns, increasing eye contact, exercising bilabial productions. Just blow a bubble and the opportunity for an excellent intervention opportunity is prepared.
- Puzzles: These provide an opportunity for longer activity. They can be of few or many pieces to work attention, taking turns, description, spatial concepts, naming of objects, concepts of parts and the whole among others.
- Books: Our job is to educate. The faster you can get a child interested in literacy, the faster he or she is exposed to the vocabulary of the world. You don't have to buy or spend a lot of money. You can even exchange books with other children. Cardboard books are more suitable for small children as they are easier to handle and more resistant than paper.
- Blocks: Blocks are very useful, and there is no need to carry a large number of them. Carry a bag with 5-10 and they can be used to build, count, name colors, and create letters, etc..
If you have questions about your child's language or speech development, don't hesitate to contact a professional as soon as possible.
by admin | Feb 26, 2016 | news
When my son turned 7 months of age we sensed that he was drooling excessively (sialorrhea). With our previous son we had not experienced any difficulty in this aspect. Many people thought it was normal because of the teething process but did not think it was normal to get so wet. He sensed that more than excess saliva, as many thought, could be a difficulty in swallowing it. As a speech therapist I knew that to help him I had to strengthen his orofacial musculature (tongue, palate veil, cheeks, etc.) since drooling could be the product of hypotonic muscles. Many times moms worried more than they should but I didn't really want to risk any difficulty in the development of their speech and for this reason we implemented two exercises very easy to do at home. 1. I decided to teach him how to drink with a straw. To start you can use a small tetrabrik straw juice (there are many options on the market). How do we get the baby who drinks from a bottle or breast to learn to drink with a straw? Very easy ! Little by little you should press the container until small amounts of juice come out. Your child will quickly learn to suck to get the juice, to swallow and will understand the process. Once the child begins to drink from the container with straw gradually press the straw in order to exert force on his musculature trying to suck the juice. The straw exercise strengthens the tongue, so that it is able to carry the saliva to the back of the mouth to be swallowed . Another very effective technique is the electric toothbrush , obviously appropriate for the size of your small mouth .
The electric toothbrush inside your mouth: cheeks, tongue and gums two or three times a day helps to increase the sensitivity of the mouth and that increase makes the child more aware of his drooling. You can also use an always small vibrator.
The combination of both exercises can be the solution of drooling in your little one ! It worked for me, if you decide to try it at home tell us how it goes ! You can send us videos and photos and thus share your experience with all of us.
Dew
by admin | Jul 24, 2014 | news
The following is a Spanish translation of an interesting article published in the journal TIME about some brain processes that make it difficult for adults and make it easier for children to learn a new language.
"A new MIT study shows that doing more can actually make some aspects of learning a new language more difficult. Although researchers have known that adults have more difficulty with new languages than children, the latest findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE, suggest that the best cognitive abilities of adults are actually the ones that can cause them to stumble.
Children have a "sensitive period" for learning new languages that lasts until puberty, and during these years, certain parts of the brain are more developed than others. For example, they are experts in procedural memory, which study author Amy Finn, of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, describes as the "memory system we get for free. He is involved in tasks that we learn unconsciously, such as bicycling, dancing, or subtle linguistic rules. It is a system that learns from observation and experience; neural circuits in the brain construct a set of rules for the construction of words and sentences by absorbing and analyzing information-like the sounds-of the world around them.
A young child's procedural memory is in its own place and working well, and it doesn't interact with other brain functions," Finn says. However, with age, another memory system that is not so much based on the processes of exploration begins to mature, and control the process of learning languages. "As an adult, you have really useful late-development memory systems that assume and do everything."
In essence, adults can over-analyze new rules of language or sounds and try to make them fit into an understandable, coherent pattern that makes sense to them. But a new language may involve grammatical rules that are not so easily explained, and adults have more difficulty overcoming obstacles than children, who simply absorb the rules or exceptions and learn from them. That is especially true with pronunciation, since the way of making sounds is something that is established early in life, and becomes second nature.
"Adults are much better at choosing things that will help them right away like words and things that will help you get around a supermarket," says Finn. "As an adult, you can learn a language functionally, but it will never sound like a native speaker."
So how can adults remove their own obstacles to learning new languages? Finn says more research is needed to determine if adults could relearn like children, but linguists are looking at a variety of options. Some include "turning off" certain areas of the brain using a medication or a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which may allow adults to be more open to accepting new rules of speech and sound.
Finn also hopes to be able to study adults who perform a difficult task while learning a language, since it's another way to distract the cognitive parts of the brain from focusing on the new language, to see if that can help absorb more linguistic information.
Abby Abrams
TIME Magazine
