shameless bribing

the following is a video of B and i doing a puzzle.  oh the puzzles.  when she first started receiving OT services one of our assignments was to work on puzzles to help her develop her fine motor skills.  then when she started working with a speech therapist she suggested we use puzzles to help B develop her speech- offer choices and require her to tell us what she wants.  puzzles, the magical toy.  and for the majority of the past 10 months i have thought of them as "those d*** puzzles."  B had little to no interest in puzzles, and there are only so many times in an hour i can say which piece do you want, the yellow or the red?  the cow or the horse?  the circle or the square?  shoot me now or later?  ok, not as bad as all that, but seriously not my favorite activity.  until the m&m's.  oh the gloriousness of the m&m.  all you haters out there don't go judging me for the sugar... or the ingredient "coloring blue 2 lake"... or the bribing.  it worked and i will forever be indebted to the m&m.  plus they are peanut m&m's, so the nutritional value is definitely there.  somewhere.  anyways, here's the video of us puzzling.  and fine motor skilling.  and offering choices.  and being awesome.

educational sidenotes:

in this video you can see B working on both her fine motor skills and her speech.  for the fine motor skills she is working on turning a piece to appropriately fit it's hole, plus she is recognizing where the piece belongs and learning to turn the piece without prompting.  for speech, we offer her choices: do you want the red or the blue.  majority of the time she will repeat whatever was offered last.  at this point she doesn't care which one i give her, but i'm told that eventually she will care which piece she receives and through offering her choices she will learn that words have meaning and are how she communicates what she truly wants.  we are also working on distinguishing colors (although not our primary focus) and her chewing skills (the size of the peanut m&m prevents her from just swallowing her candy).