She loves puppies, so I've been using Dick and Jane books to give us plenty of opportunity to say the word "Spot," since that is the name of their puppy.
When we started on this particular project (just recently—we added it because she figured out /k/), she would always say, "Sot" instead of "spot." So we practiced saying "pot" and then "s" and then sssssss...pot and then put everything together.
"Sput," Phoebe said.
And I thought, "You know what? That's great! She's got the /sp/ and we can work on adding the vowel later."
Kind of like how she (finally) learned how to say /k/ by gagging herself with her index finger (basically).
Look—it helps! If you can't say /k/ (or you have a child who can't say /k/) because they are "fronting" the /k/ sound, turning it into /t/, hold down your/their tongue with your finger (because that's typically handy, though I can't speak for the cleanliness of it) or a tongue depressor (if you're a germaphobe) or whatever.
If you try to say /t/ while holding down your tongue, you will (eventually) say /k/ instead.
It took Phoebe a hot minute to figure it out, but she's got it now.
And she doesn't even have to stick her finger in her mouth to make her tongue make the sound anymore (though she does still often grab her neck to remind herself, because that's where the /k/ sound is made...basically...Phoebe sometimes goes overboard and gets really guttural with her /k/ and Andrew goes, "And that's how Arabic was invented" because they use several guttural sounds that we don't typically use in English and...anyway...Phoebe can say /k/ now...and /kh/).
We were at the pool the other day and we were playing a game where she was a mermaid princess on a floatie throne and I...was her horse.
Super. Dignified. Role.
And she would command me to gallop/swim her off to the deeper end of the pool and then she'd point back to her castle on the stairs and say, "Now doe bat!"
So I'd let go of her floatie and I'd *poof* turn into a bat and flap my wings and "screech, screech, screech" into the night air.
At least...I assume it was night...since I was out and about in my bat form.
"What are you doing?" Phoebe asked.
"Echolocation," I told her.
"Why?" she asked. "I want to doe bat to my tassel."
"I am being a bat," I said.
"Why?"
"Because you said, 'Now go bat!'"
"NO! Now doe back!"
"Ooooooooh, well, why didn't you say so?"
And I'd pull her back to her castle on the stairs.
I'm not sure who was humouring whom, but we played this way for quite some time while the older kids played (and screamed at each other) in the deep end. Always I made her correct "back" and sometimes I made her correct "go" and soon she started spontaneously saying "back" to prevent me from turning into a bat altogether.
So we're having great success with the /k/ sound, though she still has some work to do with it coming out automatically the first time she speaks.
The /sp/ blend has been so important to her—largely because of Spot—so she's been walking around the house practicing:
"Sp. Sp. Sp. Sp. Sp."
All day long.
She's got that sound blend down. But adding it to a word is...tricky. She can't seem to get the "ahhhhh" in Spot in there. As a central vowel, it's too open, too low, too far back from those alveolar/labial sounds. She doesn't want to move her mouth from its position...so she typically says something like "spit" or "sput" but I honestly think she's going for no vowel at all.
SPT.
She actually has been having trouble with /a/ in her reading lessons as well. She usually says /ɛ/ (as in bed or get), which doesn't work so well when you're trying to say cat or sat. So when we get to /a/ (really to /æ/) we open our mouths really wide and yell "AAAAAAAAAH!" before we try reading the word...because...that helps.
I was trying to get her to do that with Spot—like how we say, "Ahhhhhh!" at the doctor when they use that tongue depressor thing.
Who'd have thought I'd ever use "tongue depressor" so many times in a single post? Anyway...
We had mixed results this evening. There's a video below. My favourite part is when I prompt her to say it "like Spot's missing and we need to find him! Say it loud!" and then she just...points to Spot...because he's not missing at all. He's literally right there.
You can also see that at one point she wants to grab her throat and/or stick her finger in her mouth to "correct" her mistake...but that's not what she needs to do to correct this mistake.
She's working through her frustrations pretty well though (you can see she's quite frustrated in this clip—and I could see she was getting frustrated in the moment—but she was still happy and giggly and more or less willing to keep trying and we soon moved on and read some more Dick and Jane and some Franklin stories and other things).
She also, yes, has both her legs through one hole of the shorts under her skirt.
Thanks for noticing.
Skorts are pretty stinking confusing to put on.
And here are some pool pictures from yesterday, I guess. We didn't go today because...we were doing other things...but we sure had a good time yesterday...pretending to be bats and horses and sharks and fishermen and tsunamis and gymnasts and...all sorts of things. We had the pool all to ourselves for hours.
Auntie K sent this fun fishing game for Phoebe (with Miriam and Benjamin when they came home from Utah):
Phoebe was very excited to try it (and that sweet little "Baby Dora" has been coming to the pool with us since Rachel picked it up at a "Trading Tables" event back in...like 2013...or something...anyway, Baby Dora comes out to swim every time we go to the pool. All my kids have adored her).
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Here's Phoebe in the chariot floatie she had me pulling her around in for the horse/castle/bat game (it's not ours but it's been at the pool all summer so we're assuming whoever it belonged to decided it was a donation):
Here's Zoë giving herself bunny ears:
And here's Alexander trying to pull Benjamin off the railing (this is another favourite game at the pool—the kids are developing excellent grip strength):
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