Jake's Journey with Apraxia

On Tuesday morning after Jake and I got home from speech therapy, we baked some gluten-free chocolate chip cookies, which he critiqued as being “nasty.” That’s a pretty descriptive adjective for a kid who has a limited vocabulary.

I glanced around at my kitchen, mixing bowls adorning my counters, flour settling into the black and brown granite, art strown all over the kitchen table, all the cushions off the sofa in the living room (my kids love to make their own “Wipeout” courses), and Nerf foam bullets scattered between both rooms. Long sigh ….

It’s amazing to me how much I have changed since I first became a stay-at-home mom. That mess would have sent the old me into panic mode. Don’t get me wrong; the chaos still bothers me, but I guess I’ve just learned to be more tolerant of it.

Out of all the “stuff” cluttering those two rooms that day, I found myself zeroing in on those Nerf bullets. My thoughts dominoed and once the dust had settled in my brain, I had come up with a pretty good speech game.

For those of you that are regular readers, you probably remember that my other two boys are older – eight and fourteen years old. Can you even begin to comprehend how many different types of Nerf guns and bullets you can accumulate over a period of about ten years? A LOT!

Although for a while I went on a kick where I was throwing away bullets every time I found one on the floor, now I don’t so much care. They only play with them once every couple of weeks and I have come to realize that they are a necessary evil if you’ve got young boys. You can’t escape them and if you don’t buy them, someone else will.

Jake is no exception to the rule. He loves playing Nerf guns with his brothers and so I decided to incorporate this fun activity with a few words that we’ve been practicing for far too long now.

I chose ten of the most difficult /p/ DIY flash cards and put double-sided tape on the back of them. Then, I put them on my stairs and let them hang as follows …

I asked Jake, “Which one do you want to get first?” He pointed one out, said the word three times, then fired. Once it was knocked down, I made him say, “I got (target word).”

My recommendation for this game would be to make sure you have a middle-of-the-road Nerf gun that holds 5-10 bullets and one that you have to cock before firing. Some of the battery operated ones will continuously fire; not such a good idea for the speech game.

We played this game on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week and Jake enjoyed it both times. This is a perfect game to introduce if your child is getting bored with saying the same words day in and day out, but hasn’t yet mastered them.