During the March holiday we brought the kids to a Fruit farm in Desaru, Malaysia. There was a small petting Zoo section with a limited selection of animals. It was the first time that the kids got to feed rabbits and goats. They were quite hesitant at first as the kids are not really into animals. Doggie boy was quite frighten to feed the rabbit and had to be coaxed by R before he gave it a try.
Goats at the petting zoo
I didn’t manage to get a good shot of the kids feeding the goats. The baby ewes were let out of the pen for them to feed but they really scared the boys when they went near to feed. Both the boys ran when the baby goat went near them. I guess if they encounter goats again in the future they would not be as fearful as the animal as they were that day.
The lone Ostrich
We didn’t get to go the Ostrich farm there while on holidays at Desaru but the kids did manage to take a look at the Lone Ostrich that we spotted at this Fruit farm. They took a glance of it and went off looking at the rabbits. I guess it wasn’t a bad decision not to visit the Ostrich farm during the trip.
Join in this week for Wordful Wednesday in the Linky Below
Since attending the assessment sessions at Thinkersbox with the boys I have been carrying out their follow up activities with Doggie boy to improve on his Auditory Attention.
One of the suggested activities was the following. Listening to ‘key words’ in a story
Pick any story or passage and read it to the child (a story that the child is interested in)
Decide on a ‘key’ word that the child needs to listen out for (choose a common word that is likely to come up many times in
the passage – such as ‘the’, ‘she’, ‘we’, etc)
As you read through the story or passage, the child needs to count how many times the key word was being said (the child can either use their fingers to count (if key word will appear less than 10 times) or write ‘1’ on a piece of paper every time they hear the key word.
At the end of the story or passage, check the child ’s answer by going through the story together with the child again (this can also help improve word recognition and reading skills)
Book Cover
Stella Strawberry The Fruit of Love is one of the books which I tried the activity with Doggie boy. The word that I had chosen was “LOVE” which could be found all throughout the book. Sometimes the word is repeated a few times on the same page. Doggie boy used his fingers to count the number of times the word appeared but he soon ran out of fingers and lost count when it went beyond 10 times. It was a good first attempt on his part though to listen actively for the chosen word.
Photo courtesy of Tales4all.com
The second time that we tried this activity I decided to use a different medium- audio books. The Treebob Audio Books are a great selection of books for kids to listen to. Each story is 15-16 minutes long and is entertaining enough to sustain a child’s interest in the storyline. Before letting Doggie boy listen to the story I told him that I was looking out for the number of instances that the main character- Rotten Rina had her name mentioned.
On this occasion he was able to accurately tell me the number of times the name was mentioned. Doggie boy was also able to relate the storyline to me after listening to the story.
I will be doing more audio books and reading of varied types of book with Doggie boy in weeks to come. Hopefully these activities will lead to a further improvement in his auditory skills.
