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Rating: 
Summary: An Excellent Book
Review: As a Speech Language Pathologist who works with very young children and a mother of 2 children, I can tell you that this book is great. I loan my book to the families that I work and all the mothers have enjoyed it. There is a lot information on child development, particularly speech and language skills. The authors give suggestions on what are good toys and activites and how to use them to increase your child's language skills. In other words, "how to play with you child". The book is very easy to read and understand. Anyone with a young child, whether they have special needs or not, will learn a tremendous amount.
Rating:
Summary: AN ABSOLUTE MUST FOR PARENTS OF SPEECH-DELAYED KIDS!
Review: I bought this when my son was 15 months and we had concerns with his speech (he was a preemie and fairly ill his first year, so we have always monitored him pretty closely). This book may seem like "obvious" information or ridiculous to a parent of a typically-developing child, but it is a wealth of information to a speech-delayed child. My son began special education preschool (for daily ST) a year after I bought this, and finally we were able to do more with it (his receptive language prior to that never came above a 6-9 month level). His ST and I would coordinate which activities I was doing with him using what sentence structure. (Right now, we are working on "wh" questions for example, ie "WHere is the ball?" "WHo is in this picture?" Early on, it was more like "Ball up. Ball down. Block up. Block down."). By being "on the same page" (no pun intended), we believe he has made more progress than he might have made if I was treating him languagewise like a typically-developing child and he was only getting the intensive language therapy at school. I also have been able to transfer the ideas to household chores (shopping: "One apple. Two apples. Two apples in the basket. One, Two."). I love the charts given of language development - I check off each consonant and consonant blend sound right in the book as he masters pronouncing then correctly. I don't have to use this book as much as I had to before, as now we are basically working with oral hypotonia, some other oral motor issues, and building his vocabulary (which he LOVES to do), but this book was great when he was unable to speak, frustrated because he couldn't make himself understood, and I still reference it at least weekly, either for my own child or to answer another concerned parent's questions. (We also used ASL for my son until he could physically produce the sounds to make words, so I signed a lot of the phrases suggested in this book as well, repeating them over and over until he could at least make himself understood through ASL.) Just a bit of clarification on the previous review, many of our kids DO develop speech "typically" - they just don't begin until much later, but then many do it in the same order as other kids. The charts and checklists in this book make it easy to track that, which can be hard when other kids the same age are saying complete sentences and you aren't sure if your child's next step will be frontal consonants. It keeps you on track of YOUR child, so you can ignore what the typically-developing kids are doing that your child isn't. (For a list of toys for kids with fine motor delays, see my list in listmania!)
Rating:
Summary: AN ABSOLUTE MUST FOR PARENTS OF SPEECH-DELAYED KIDS!
Review: I bought this when my son was 15 months and we had concerns with his speech (he was a preemie and fairly ill his first year, so we have always monitored him pretty closely). This book may seem like "obvious" information or ridiculous to a parent of a typically-developing child, but it is a wealth of information to a speech-delayed child. My son began special education preschool (for daily ST) a year after I bought this, and finally we were able to do more with it (his receptive language prior to that never came above a 6-9 month level). His ST and I would coordinate which activities I was doing with him using what sentence structure. (Right now, we are working on "wh" questions for example, ie "WHere is the ball?" "WHo is in this picture?" Early on, it was more like "Ball up. Ball down. Block up. Block down."). By being "on the same page" (no pun intended), we believe he has made more progress than he might have made if I was treating him languagewise like a typically-developing child and he was only getting the intensive language therapy at school. I also have been able to transfer the ideas to household chores (shopping: "One apple. Two apples. Two apples in the basket. One, Two."). I love the charts given of language development - I check off each consonant and consonant blend sound right in the book as he masters pronouncing then correctly. I don't have to use this book as much as I had to before, as now we are basically working with oral hypotonia, some other oral motor issues, and building his vocabulary (which he LOVES to do), but this book was great when he was unable to speak, frustrated because he couldn't make himself understood, and I still reference it at least weekly, either for my own child or to answer another concerned parent's questions. (We also used ASL for my son until he could physically produce the sounds to make words, so I signed a lot of the phrases suggested in this book as well, repeating them over and over until he could at least make himself understood through ASL.) Just a bit of clarification on the previous review, many of our kids DO develop speech "typically" - they just don't begin until much later, but then many do it in the same order as other kids. The charts and checklists in this book make it easy to track that, which can be hard when other kids the same age are saying complete sentences and you aren't sure if your child's next step will be frontal consonants. It keeps you on track of YOUR child, so you can ignore what the typically-developing kids are doing that your child isn't. (For a list of toys for kids with fine motor delays, see my list in listmania!)
Rating: 
Summary: I found this book to be disappointing
Review: This book might be helpful to parents of newborns who have no idea how to play with their children. For everyone else, it has a pretty obvious and unimaginative take on how to use toys to stimulate language development. A typical suggested dialog for playing with legos is: "Yes, Bobby, that is a blue block! Here is another blue block! Now there are two blue blocks and they are exactly the same!" and so on. There are lots of lists of things your child should be doing at various ages; but if you are interested in this book, your child has special needs and you probably already know he/she isn't going to develop in a typical way. To me, this book wasn't worth the money.
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