Play is so important for your child’s development. Did you know that good play skills can help your child later on in their academic career? Play is the foundation of your child’s critical thinking, problem solving and social skills. Children learn best through play and being engaged with others. When your child is playing, whether with their shape sorter as a baby or board games as a kindergartner, they are developing critical thinking, problem solving and social skills. Your child’s ability to play as a baby, toddler and as a young elementary school student will impact their ability to navigate through their academic career. Play is the basis of everything and so very important!
Summer break is coming to a close in DC, so it’s a good time to get some extra play time in with your child! The Inspired Treehouse has a blog post dedicated to family play. You can see the list on their website. We picked some of our favorites from their list to share with you below.
Explore the Magic of Your Backyard, Front Yard or Local Park Play on the swing-set. Play a game of tag. Shoot some hoops Play with sidewalk chalk. Catch fireflies. Play with hula hoops. Set up a lemonade stand. Play with bubbles. Have a squirt gun or hose fight. Try a round of backyard golf!
Get Moving Take a bike ride. Fly a kite. Go to the pool. Find a new hiking trail. Go for a scavenger hunt around your neighborhood or local park. Head to the playground or local park. Climb a tree. Do animal walks Go canoeing or kayaking. Try yoga together as a family. Play jump rope.
Try Some Indoor Fun Build a fort. Play with your couch cushions! Have a family game night. Play I Spy. Play with Play-Doh. Visit a new museum. Try out a new water park.
Work and Play as a Team Make-up your own relay-race Work together to create an art project. Cook a meal together. Learn a new skill –cartwheels, somersaults, monkey bars, swimming!
Use Your Imagination! Play dress up. Make your own movie or play. Make your own musical instrument and start a band! Bring out all of the stuffed animals in the house and play pet shop. Line up all of the chairs in the house, get out a few suitcases and pretend you’re on a train or plane! Learn how animals fall asleep and pretend to be each one.
We hope you and your child have fun trying out some of these ideas! Check back on The Speech Space blog for other fun ideas, toys and games you can do with your child to help increase their communication development.
If you have questions or concerns about your child’s development, contact us at The Speech Space! We offer free screenings, which take approximately 30 minutes, and can help identify potential problems.
Parents often want to know what sounds their child should have or be using correctly. Today’s post focuses on what your 5 year old should be able to do. If you missed our post about 4 year olds, find it here!
By the time your child is 5 years old, they should be able to make most sounds correctly on their own without help or reminders (with the exception of R sometimes, which we will touch on later). At 5 years old your child should be able to easily produce the following sounds all the time in conversation: all vowel sounds, H, M, B, P, W, F,V, K, G, Y, L, Blends (e..g, two sounds together–SM, GL, etc), S, Z, SH, CH, J and typically, R and R blends (e.g., GR, BR, PR, STR, FR, KR). Most children will start being able to use TH and ZH (e.g., vision; fusion, television) on their own by 5 years old, but technically these sounds aren’t mastered until the age of 6.
Now, time to talk about that “R” sound! Children often master their “R”s around 8 years old, so experts call R the “late 8”. However, in our experience most children will naturally acquire this sound well before that time and waiting that long (or longer) to get it fixed just makes it harder.
The reason some children easily acquire R on their own and other children do not can depend on a few things. Maybe your child has some low muscle tone through their lips, mouth, tongue and/or jaw (see our article here about fun activities you can do at home to strengthen up your child’s oral musculature). Or if your child needed help acquiring other sounds before R, it is likely they may need help with this tough sound.
Another important marker to think about is how intelligible your child is (i.e., how much can other people understand what your child says). A child of 5 years old should be at least 95% intelligible– meaning people should understand at least 95% of what your child says, regardless of if the context is known or unknown.
If your child is having difficulty acquiring sounds at the appropriate ages and others have a hard time understanding them, speech therapy can help. Not only will speech therapy help your child acquire the sounds they are missing and help with their overall intelligibility, it can also help your child with their future academic skills.
Did you know children with articulation issues often have trouble with their pre-reading and reading skills? Speech therapy can help prevent and even work on these issues for your child.
If you are having concerns about your child’s development reach out to us at The Speech Space! We offer free screenings, which take approximately 30 minutes, and can help identify potential problems.
It’s time again for our monthly segment: Favorite Toys Without Batteries! As we talked about here, here, here, and here we love toys without batteries. Below is The Speech Space’s July list of great toys that don’t make noise, so that you can get your child talking more while you play!
Buckaroo: This game makes it really easy to work on expanding your child’s vocabulary and basic concept knowledge in a fun way! When we play this game, everyone playing describes the supply they want and the other players have to guess which supply is being described. Work on having your child use different descriptors to describe the item they want to get (e.g., attributes–color, shape, size, number, function, and category). If your child is unable to do this by themselves, you can help by prompting them (e.g., “What color is it?”; “What size is it? Small, medium or big?”; “What group does it belong to?”). Once the game is over you can work on these same concepts in a receptive language task (vs. during the game when you are working on your child’s expressive language skills). You can work on your child’s receptive language skills by giving them the clues or descriptions to clean up the correct supply you describe (e.g., “Get the one that is green, big in real life, has spikes, is a type of plant, and we find it in the desert”– the cactus!).
**Pro-tip: While you are playing you may need to remind your child to put the items on the saddle very carefully otherwise he will Buckaroo! This game is typically easier for children in Pre-K and older because of the need to self-monitor how gently you put items on the saddle.
Bowling Toy bowling sets can be inexpensive and fun for the younger crowd. We like to use them with our early talkers as a way to really encourage using language during play. While setting up the pins you can use functional words (e.g., “Up-up-up” for each pin), name the pins (e.g., animals), or even name the colors or count the pins as your child gets older. Have your child tell WHO and WHAT they should do (“I roll the ball” or “You roll the ball”, etc.), or HOW you should roll it (“Through my legs” or “Under the table”, etc). After they’ve rolled the ball, talk about what happened to the pins, using quantitative concepts like “all” or “one” (e.g., “One fell down!” or “They all fell down!”).
Critter Clinic This veterinary clinic is such a fun toy for kids 3 years and older. When we use this toy in therapy sessions we like to put a bunch of small stuffed animals inside each “room” (we found a bunch of old Beanie Babies on eBay for under $8). Have your child tell you which color door they will open and then give your child clues as to what the animal inside will be. This is a great way to work on early inferencing and understanding complex language. Once they open the door and find the animal, have them tell you about it (where the animal lives, defining features, color, parts of the animal, etc) to increase their expressive vocabulary. Once all the animals are out, use the doctor tools to have your child pretend to be a veterinarian. During this time you can help your child with understanding the specific names for each tool and it’s function. If you have extra band-aids (or even some tape and a tissue), have your child tell you where the animals have boo-boo’s and give them bandages.
Check back on The Speech Space blog for other fun ideas, toys and games you can do with your child to help increase their communication development. And as always, if you have questions or concerns about your child’s development, contact us at The Speech Space! We offer free screenings, which take approximately 30 minutes, and can help identify potential problems.
As we talked about in this post, the iPad can be a useful tool with the right boundaries. Along with being mindful about how you use technology with your child, it’s important to find apps that you can actually use for your child’s language development. Here are a few of The Speech Space’s favorite apps and some ways to work language skills into the technology.
Toca Boca Hair Salon: This app let’s you pick a character and then cut and style their hair. Kids love changing the length, style, and color of hair and seeing all the fun creations they can come up with. This app has so many opportunities to incorporate a ton of adjectives in order to expand your child’s utterances– short, long, curly, wavy, straight, brown, blonde, red, wet, damp, dry…the list could go on and on. This is a slow paced app, which gives you a lot of time to make sure that your child is able to describe their creations.
Pepi Doctor: Your child gets to be the doctor in the this app! They choose what part of the patient they want to help and then they take care of all their ailments. This app is great for working on real-life vocabulary. In addition to vocabulary building there are also opportunities to help your child understand the functions of items; such as, a thermometer is used to take your temperature or the dentist uses the drill to clean your teeth. The Pepi Doctor app gives your child a way to play with instruments in an environment where you can explain more about them. You can also have your child explain to you what they did to help the patient in the game and why the patient needed help. Additionally, this app is good for inferencing and describing.
Peek-a-boo Barn: In this app different farm animals alternate appearing behind the barn doors. They each make their own animal noises (presumably saying “hi!” or “let me out of this barn!”) behind the closed barn door. Before you or your child touch the barn door to let them out, have your child guess which animal they hear (early inferencing skills). Once the door is open you can talk about or ask questions about the animal (e.g., “What did the donkey say?”, “What does an owl do?”, “What does a cow make?”, “What color is the pig?”). This app is great for younger kids working on early inferencing skills, naming animals, answering simple questions, working on putting together 2-4 word phrases (e.g., “Hi Cow.”, “Goodnight Chicken.” , “Open door for Goat.”).
Using apps can be a fun and innovative way to work on building your child’s language skills. However, it is important to remember that children do learn best through real-life engagements and interactions. If you are choosing to use apps with your child make sure you are truly using the apps with them. We’ll add some more of our favorite apps in future blog posts, so come back to check them out!
If you have questions or concerns about your child’s development, contact us at The Speech Space! We offer free screenings, which take approximately 30 minutes, and can help identify potential problems.
