When Jake first got diagnosed with apraxia and I was on a Google frenzy, I read, When a child has Childhood Apraxia of Speech he or she may need 3,000 productions of a sound combination or word to learn a muscle memory for that combination. Whoa! To say the least, that statistic upset and overwhelmed me. So many words, so little time … and what a steep hill to climb. How would we ever make it to the top?
Fast forward nine months later and we are steadily approaching that1,000 mark. And for those of you just starting the process, in retrospect, it hasn’t been that bad. We’ve gotten into a routine and have figured out what does and does not work for us.
For the past month or so, Jake’s been getting bored with his iPad flash cards and I’ve been short on time, so I tried a different approach with him. I’ve been sitting outside on the patio with him or laying in bed propped up on pillows, and I say each word on my list and he repeats it after me. When he completes 100-150 words or so, he gets to do a fun activity. I’m happy to report that he can now mimic these words almost perfectly. Our SLP, however, has said before we can move beyond the first set of Kaufman words, he has to be able to look at the picture on the card and “recall” what it is. He really struggles with this.
Jake will be four in three months and it is beyond important to me that he moves past this first set of Kaufman cards before his birthday.So, last week I got out the card stock and made about 150 flash cards with the words that he needs to master. It was my mission to have them completed before my other kids got out of school for summer break.
Here are the details about my DIY apraxia flash cards that turned out amazing …
I used a different color card stock for each set of sounds (b,p,h,w,m,n,t,d). Then, I got out the ruler and divided each 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper into 6 even squares. I have all of the Kaufman words written down and actually could recite most of them by memory, so I typed each word in bold, black print at the bottom of each square.
Now, for the time-consuming part: PICTURES. This is exhausting in a fun, challenging, will-I-ever-make-it kind of way. I used some of our own family pictures, snapped photos out of his favorite books, and got the rest from Google Image. (Yes, Jake helped me through most of this process, which slowed me down considerably, but was super exciting for him).
I saved all of the pictures onto my computer and then selected them to print as a contact sheet. These parameters enabled me to print twelve pictures to a page and were the perfect size for my flash cards. I did this in a few different sessions and this is what my dining room table looked like for a little over a week …
When they were finally complete, I lugged the kids into the car and we went to Staples to have them laminated. This was much more expensive than I thought, but I knew in order to do it right, I couldn’t cheap out on this step. It was about $1.50 for each 8 1/2 x 11 sheet to be laminated and then a flat $8 fee to cut them first before laminating so that they wouldn’t peel up once they were cut again into flash cards. This is how they looked after laminating, but before the dreaded task of cutting …
After I cut all the cards out, I hole-punched each corner, sorted each set by sound in order from easy to difficult, and then attached each set with a metal ring. The finished product looks like this …
My other son practiced his sight words this way when he was in kindergarten and he loved quickly flipping through his words. As my neighbor who teaches Pre-K 4 said, “There’s just something kids love about that metal ring.” Maybe these flash cards will be a quick, straight-forward way for him to practice his words, while at the same time introducing him to phonics.
