Another Whiteboard Idea

(A quick, yet hopefully helpful, interruption to my camp posts)

I've realised recently that many children with language delay have difficulty talking about the home. Areas of difficulty seem to be questions such as:

• What are the different rooms?
• What kinds of furniture/items do you find in each room?
• What are some of the actions that you do in each room? etc.

I had a 5 year old who, when asked to tell me some of the things he might find in the bathroom, could only name his bath toys. I found this quite interesting, as these rooms, and the items within them form part of our daily living and interaction.

After some careful thought, I got to work yesterday doing some drawing on my whiteboard, and some printing cutting and laminating. My final product looked like this (please don't laugh I am not an artist):

I found some cliparts of furniture and different objects for each room, printed, cut, laminated, and stuck magnetic backing on them. Children today got to pull each object from the bag and say which room it belonged to then stick it on. They really enjoyed this. Some of the questions that came up in addition to the above ones included:

• How are the kitchen and bathroom same/different?
• Why wouldn't you put the toilet in the living room, bed in the kitchen etc?
• Function questions for each object pulled.
• What other items might you find in the bedroom, living room, etc?
• If you wanted to bake a cake which room would you go to (and similar questions)?

I also recently found an amazing app called My Play Home, which is the best $2.99 I have ever spent. It allows you to interact with objects in different rooms across the house and I'm amazed every time I use it with clients. It's the one app they always ask for. My favourite part is getting the family to eat all the food in the kitchen :).

Let me know if you try out the house on the magnetic whiteboard, and as usual if you email me I can send you the furniture and items I found online so you can save on some of the prep work.