Practice and develop speech
Using everyday activities can be a great way to practice and develop speech, language and literacy skills.
These activities can also change a chore into a pleasurable bit of family time. Your child may not even realise that you are practising speech and language skills because the activity will be fun. Using everyday tasks to promote speech and language is relatively easy.
You just have to use your imagination:
- Preparing dinner: Use lots of words and include the child in preparing dinner; talk to your child, and model the words for them. Introduce vocabulary: wash, scrub, clean, stir, pot, sink, fridge, table, chair, plates.
- Cleaning the bedroom: Play “I-spy” to practice initial sound awareness (good for speech and language development). I spy a doll, I spy a shirt, I spy a teddy.
- Take a pause, talk about what the people on the street are doing (e.g. walking, working, running etc) or name as many different occupations that you can see (driver, policeman, road-worker, shopkeeper etc).
- Books are great for having a shared focus and for learning new words. Books can also play a key part in developing early speech and literacy skills. There are many ways to use books and the pictures to focus on language. You can focus on books with symbolic sounds for early speech or storybooks to focus on language.
These are just some simple ways to use everyday opportunities to find entertaining and simple ways to focus on speech and language. Remember, if you make speech and language sessions into games your child enjoys it more, is more motivated and may not even see it as speech and language practice, but as a game. So have fun :-)