Nolan turns one! As we live rather far from family and have no one visiting in late August, his birthday will be a rather small affair. My biggest challenge is to find great toys that we don't already have, owing to the fact that we have a 2 1/2 year old who has amassed an assortment of Duplos and cars, toy tools and bikes.I went through our toys and got rid of the ones that Nolan is now too old for (the walker, the baby gym, and the bouncy chair). Going through our stock of toys, I tried to find toys we are lacking, and ones that would be good for Nolan's speech and language development. Any ideas are welcomed, from those who have toddlers and have a toy that they love! My ideas so far are:
- A Little Tikes "Jungle Jamboree" piano. We don't have any real music-making toys.
- The Fisher Price Little People farm
- A toy lawn mower (we have one, but we have two boys)!
- Richard Priddy books (we have three)
- A toy with a "repeat speaker" built into it- it repeats what the child says.
- A toy telephone (amazingly, we don't have one)
- A See and Say
We have a good set of unit blocks that my little guys play with all the time (probably THE favorite toy), so I might get the castle-shaped extension set for those.
I am also going to make a "learning to listen" sound box, but I don't want that to be for the little guy's birthday. He repeated the "aaaaa" I made for "airplane" the other day, and it totally rocked my world. We seem to have lost our "B," "M," and "N" sounds, and I'm hoping that's just a phase. We have "D," "L," and "A." Usually Nolan wanders around making a "ldldldldldl" noise, which is impossible for any of us to reproduce. In the meantime, I'm working extra hard on "MAMA" since he seems to have the "dadada" sound down pat. Matthew FINALLY says mama, after 2 1/2 years of work! Hopefully Nolan will say it a little sooner than that!
6 comments:
I found you through Deaf Village and thought I'd pipe up... At one (well, now even) my toddler absolutely loved all of the Laugh & Learn toys from Fisher Price. They can be as big as the Learning Home (a gift from his grandparents that he still plays with today) to a little tool bench and all sorts of things in between. They all sing songs and do some repetition of words (open, closed, up, down, that sort of thing), plus are super fun.
Watch those b,n,m's those are what we lose when we need mapping. Happy Birthday little man!!
http://www.soesd.k12.or.us/Page.asp?NavID=713 LOOK at this site, it shows you how close those sounds are together.
Some of Drew's favorites...
Vacuum cleaner
Golf clubs (Fisher Price has a great set at Target)
Set of cars: taxi, police, fire, etc. - great for grouping items together as "cars" and then discussing individual names
Bug Catcher: again, great for grouping "bugs" and then identifing lady bug, cricket, grasshopper, etc.
Can't believe he will be one soon! Time just flies by...
I think I'm going to make a trip down to Toys R Us in Erie soon! I still need to clear out some outgrown or worn out toys, and then I'm going shopping! A toy vacuum cleaner is a good idea- Nolan is obsessed with ours and chases it around and tries to lay on it. Strange, but he really loves it!
I'm definitely a tad worried about the loss of the "b, m, n" sounds. Last night he made several "nanana" sounds, so it is a little reassuring. He has another hearing test in August, and I'm really hoping that he's stable from the last test in May!
1st Birthday! How fun :)
We have lots of toys that involve pushing a button, touching something, w/ a sound as a reward. I always thought the more the kids could get positive reinforcement involving listening, the better it was. That said, now almost every toy we own makes some kind of noise......ugh.
Happy toy shopping!
I love first birthdays! There seems to be so much out there! I'll have to come back to your site when we start buying things for Aiden's first bday or Christmas and relook at all these great ideas!! I'm still amazed at all the different things they have now that they didn't even 6 yrs ago!
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