Book Review: Early Intervention Games

 I'm back with another book review! 

When I started my new job, one of the conditions of my employment was that I would become early intervention certified. After completing all of the requirements, I was handed my first EI patient - an 11 month old child. It was the youngest child I had ever worked with! I didn't have kids of my own yet. I felt completely lost. Since then, I have seen probably 100 different EI patients and have grown a lot as a clinician. And one of the things that helped me on that journey was this book. 

Early Intervention Games by Barbara Sher (affiliate link) is PACKED with great activities to use with your child (as you can probably tell from all the little flags sticking out of my copy!). The activities are motor based -either fine or gross - which is great! I have found that speech often accompanies movement. Not to mention, most of my patients also receive OT or PT services. Being able to incorporate those activities into my therapy is really the model of EI. 

While the book may not be geared towards SLPs, each activity comes with a song or verbal routine you can do. Which is absolutely PERFECT for language development in those little bitties. I also love that the games have social components to them - making it easy to incorporate the family into therapy (another emphasis of EI). The materials are simple, usually common household items or inexpensive purchases. 

The beginning of the book gives great information about the importance of sensory regulation to learning. It gave me some wonderful talking points when explaining this to parents. The beginning of the book also touches on Pivotal Response Training, Floortime, PECs, ABA, Star Program, Miller Method, and Feingold Diet. While it does not give in-depth information about these programs, it does give an overview and some things for you to consider. I have begun researching some of these programs because of this book. 

Towards the end of the book, there is a section with water games. Some of the games could easily be modified to use with a water table or bin. But a lot of them require a large body of water, like a pool. I know a lot of us don't have access to a pool for therapy, making this part of the book less useful. However, if you are lucky enough to have that resource available to you, then you DEFINITELY need this book for ideas for water therapy. 

If you see Early Intervention aged children, children with Autism, or children with SPD; I would HIGHLY recommend this book to spice up your therapy! 

Thanks for stopping by!