Speaking of Apraxia by Leslie A Lindsay is an easy-to-read comprehensive guide geared towards parents who have a child diagnosed with Apraxia. Apraxia is a motor-speech disorder characterized by difficulty in planning correct speech sounds in the brain and communicating them in the proper sequence to the speech muscles. Written by a parent whose child was diagnosed with Apraxia, this book walks parents through the typical stages of receiving a diagnosis, accessing Speech and Language resources, and transitioning to school. The author uses current research as well as their personal experience to inform the reader without overwhelming them with jargon or professional lingo.
Loose parts provide the foundation for a play-based emergent curriculum that focuses on inquiry driven learning. According to Simon Nicholson, the definition for loose parts states: “In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.” 
This uplifting book was the winner of 8 Mom’s Choice Awards. It is a great reminder for everyone about the importance of kindness and lifting each other up. I referenced a lot of thoughts and ideas that I had while reading this book during several conversations with educators in school age programs. It made me think about positive group reinforcements for being kind to one another every day. Through conversations with both the educators and children, we came up with an idea to have physical buckets for each child in the program and a big jar of pom poms to put in another child’s bucket when someone noticed them doing something nice for a peer, or just being kind throughout the afternoon. 
