Friday, November 30, 2012

Free Friday!

                                     Grab while you can...

Toca Tailor Fairy Tales (Another great app by Toca Boca - Design and style your own clothes! Time to get busy with those design skills! Create, combine and style fun outfits for two characters in a beautiful Fairy Tale setting. Mix and match colors, prints and fabrics – or use the built-in fabric camera to create your very own unique patterns from things around you.)

KanDo (Fun application designed to challenge you while you perform some simple but interesting tasks requiring a good level of hand-eye coordination, finger dexterity, steadiness and quickness.)

Oh, What a Tangle (This is an enchanting story of a little girl who refuses to comb her hair.)

Nighty Night HD Winter Special (Need a Go-To- Sleep book with music...zzzz?)

Ambientarium (Not asleep yet?  Play with this particle visualizer to calm down.)

Move and Match (This could be used for many different purposes such as school projects, sentence structure activities, fill-the-gap activites, sequencing and so so so much more!)

Social Stories (Throw away your laminator and velcro - this is a must-have app for any parent of a child with ASD.  Make social stories with your own text and pictures and make use of the 3 supplied examples.  Also use it to create simple daily schedules.)

Kid Cars (Like to play with cars and trucks? Kids CARS app is like playing with real cars.)

Super Monkey Jr - mini games (Works on their fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, planning, sorting and counting while doing activities like driving a car, putting out fires and going through a maze.)

Alphabet Fruit (Are kids not recognizing fruit these days because of all the junk food surrounding us?  Here are some great photo images.)

Little Ears - Sounds for Toddlers (Teaches and quizzes your kid about sounds of actions and objects surrounding us.)

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Back and Running

Taking the first step is key in a lot of areas of life.  Take for instance our morning running group at Hosmer.  Typically we start it up each spring, but I get questions from kids each fall about when we are running again.  I have good intentions, but beginning school activities always crowd out these intentions, forcing them to the bottom of my to-do list.

Well, right before Thanksgiving, I printed out two signs, taped them on the door of the school and announced that we were running to start our day.  Simple...meet at the big field at 8:00 am and back in at 8:15 am every Monday and Wednesday.  Is this a questionable time of year to start an outside activity in the Northeast?  Yes! Are we doing it anyway? Yes...and that is exactly why we are doing it!  Doing the "unexpected" adds fun to your life.

I always pair my other good intentions with physical activity.  Last year after jumping into a body of water everyday for a month, I decided to start a habit of posting to this blog every day for a month.  Now that we are running two days a week, I might as well try to post two days a week as well.  Here goes...