I made a thing - Silly Words Educational Game

I made a thing.

Our son is eight now and reads, writes, and talks fairly well, but it took us a while to get him started. One of the challenges we found was that a lot of the books weren't really engaging for him.

What we did find that really worked for him, and gave him a start into reading sentences, was a game where you could build a sentence up out of words (a bit like this Big Box of Sentence Building). We found that our son really liked making silly sentences - in particular, I remember once he made "the cat ate the baby" and was laughing so hard that he went red in the face and almost started having an asthma attack!

We continue to have difficulty encouraging him to read, because although he can do it he doesn't find a lot of interest in it.

One idea I had the other day was to make a game, which is a bit like Cards Against Humanity (a very adult party game) where basically you've got a number of questions, and a number of answers.  What you do is you pick a question, and your child picks an answer that they find funny for the question.  As part of this you can encourage them to read both the question and the answer

Example question with a few answers

My son found it very funny, while allowing him to do some reading and speaking, he also came up with some new answers which was nice to see a bit of imaginative play.

If anyone would like to download a copy of the game you can freely download it from the link below:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bndkzquHRSMIlP4xIT9NdnWp13_vbNpE?usp=sharing

Silly Words is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Which basically means you can print it, play it, change it however you want for your use (I've included via the link the MS Publisher file that the game is made from so you can customise it for your child), but don’t make your fortune selling it :D

Sausages!

I'm pretty tired tonight - for those that haven't been reading every post with baited breath (shame on you!) I've been down with pneumonia and just returned to work this week, and I've been feeling tired afterwards (surprise surprise).  Tonight I've just got in from a Family First class run by the local Council / NHS Trust (I've never quite sure how it's organised) for parents of autistic children.  Tonight's session was all about sensory impact on behaviour, over stimulation, under stimulation and how to handle both.  It had some interesting ideas - one that might work for our son is some kind of pop up blackout tent that he could use to go and calm down in when he needs it - and the sessions are good, although when you're feeling tired the prospect of going out again isn't always appealing! (but it's well worth it)

I've just eaten some fantastic sausages from Fields of Anlaby.  Fields is an award winning butchers (see their news page for details) who I can confirm sells some excellent steak, sausages, pies, scones and pasties.  Definitely worth checking out if you're in the area (and they have their own mobile app!) - they don't seem to do a Lincolnshire sausage however, which is always one that I'm interested in trying.  For the record, the best ever Lincolnshire sausage (that I know of - if you're a butcher then you're welcome to challenge my statement by sending me free samples!) is from Jacksons in Louth - full of spices and really tasty.  My dad would also recommend their stuffed chine (which if you've never tried it is worth a shot).

The other thing I've been really enjoying is clips from Who's Line Is It Anyway on YouTube.  I particularly recommend this video of the two regulars, Colin Mochrie and Ryan Stiles, and their banter.