5 Activities for Speech and Language at Home
Many parents often wonder how to work on their child’s speech and language goals at home. Below are five amazing ideas on how to enhance your child’s speech and language through a more natural environment. These activities can be implemented at home no matter what your child’s age is.
Continue reading to find out more!
1.Baking or Cooking
We can target inferencing, following directions, and describing with this activity. Start by choosing a recipe to prepare. You can help your child practice their inferencing skills by taking out all the ingredients and see if your child can guess what you are making. To help your child follow directions, you can read each step to them and have them complete the step, or you can make things more complex by giving 2 steps at a time or giving temporal directions (ex. “Before you add the milk, crack one egg”). To work on describing, have your child describe the items you are using (such as colors, textures, tastes, smells, etc.). You can also target describing by having your child describe each step as it is being completed.
2. Create a Photo Album
With this activity, we can target, expressive language, sentence formulation, and describing. Choose which photos you want to use for the album. You can use family photos or pictures the child took themselves. As you are creating the album, develop captions for each photo. Have your child work on using the correct pronouns, describe what the people are doing in the photo, discuss where each photo was taken, and assist your child in using adjectives and verbs for the photos. For example, “They are building a tall sand castle at Virginia Beach.”
3. Scavenger Hunts
This is a fun way to target describing, categories, and articulation! Create a scavenger hunt around your home with different objects that contain your child’s articulation sounds. For example, finding S words – steps, spoon, cinnamon, celery, cell phone, stove, soap. As your child finds each object work on describing the object and naming what category it belongs to (ex. Snacks, electronics, furniture, etc.).
4. What’s in the Bag?
Here is another way to work on inferencing, describing, and sentence formulation. Gather smaller objects around your home and put them in a bag. The items could be anything! Some examples are hair pieces, batteries, kitchen utensils, toys, etc. Give clues to your child and see if they can guess what the item is. After your child guesses, take turns and have them give you clues about their item.
5. Games
While playing games, you can work on any goal! Board and card games offer children tons of opportunities to target their speech and language goals. Practice following directions but explaining the rules of the game to your child. Work on their articulation skills throughout the game (say 5 words then take a turn). Some games, such as Hedbanz and Pictionary aim to target describing and inferencing. Games like Candyland and Uno, work on numbers and colors. Most games also target turn taking as well!
As you can see, there are many simple ideas on how to incorporate your child’s speech and language skills at home! Now, select a few ideas and go try them out for yourself!
-Tracy Heupel, SLP