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.
It’s time again for our monthly segment: Favorite Toys Without Batteries! As we talked about in our previous segments, we love toys without batteries. Below is The Speech Space’s August list of great toys that don’t make noise, so that you can get your child talking more while you play!
Melissa & Doug Lock and Roll Rescue Garage: This is a great toy for younger children and targets a lot of vocabulary. This garage has 3 colored doors and 3 keys. Each door is a different color and each lock is a different shape, so your child needs to match the key to the door color and then notice how to correctly fit the key into the lock to open the door. Once the door is unlocked, you can roll up the garage door and 1 of 3 emergency vehicles is inside (firetruck, police car, ambulance). This toy allows you to target color, shape, preposition (in, out, up, down), and vehicle vocabulary.
Marble Tower: This toy allows children to build their own tower or track for marbles to race down. When building these tracks, you are able to work on both receptive and expressive language skills. Receptively, you can describe the piece you want your child to find, or tell them where to put it (e.g., “Put the green piece on top of the blue piece with the wheel.”). Expressively, have your child tell you which piece to find or where to put it. Make sure they are specific and name features of the piece they want (e.g., “It’s pink and has a spinner.”, “It’s the long yellow piece.”).
Animal Pop-Up Toy: The Speech Space likes this option and this option These toys are great for the toddler and younger crowd. Once your child is a toddler, this toy can be great for working on problem solving skills (i.e., figuring out how to open each box/make the animals pop up, how to close the boxes/animals), as well as, your child’s expressive and receptive language skills. Receptively, you can tell your child which animal to pop up (e.g., “Open the pig”; “Where is dog?”). Expressively you and your child can work on naming the animals, making the animal noises,
Animal noise suggestions for young children working on imitating new words/sounds: Chicken says “bawk bawk”, Sheep says “ba ba”, Horse says “neigh neigh”, Cow says “moo moo”
Animal noise suggestions for young children working on imitating new words/sounds: Giraffe says “nom nom” (like eating leaves), Elephant says (raspberry noise with lips), Bear says “Grrr”, Lion says “rawwwr”, Monkey says “oo-oo, ee-ee”
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 missed our previous Toys Without Batteries segments, check them out under the ”Toys” category! 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.
Two of the most common concerns we hear from parents are the number of words their child has in their vocabulary and how many words their child uses/combines. While there are many activities to build vocabulary, there are some simple and easy strategies you can regularly use to target increasing your child’s vocabulary and length of utterance.
1. Play dumb: Parents are so great at anticipating and knowing exactly what their child wants or needs– event if they are not always using words. Your child may use a variety of tactics to express what they want or need (e.g., pointing, dragging others to what they want, gesture, or whining/screaming). A great strategy that parents can use is playing dumb. Kids love when adults get silly, so pretend that you don’t know what they want. If your child points at goldfish for a snack, pretend you thought they were pointing to something else. When playing dumb, it’s very important to model the word or words you want your child to use in order to get their wants/needs met. If your child is pointing to goldfish for a snack, after you pretend to think they wanted something else (only one time), you need to follow it up with modeling “goldfish” or “fish” for your child to imitate you. Depending on how many words your child has and is using, you can make your model more complex. For example, if your child is only using one-word phrases model “goldfish” or “fish” only. If they are working on using two-word phrases, model “want goldfish” or “eat goldfish”. You can use this strategy throughout the day with your child (during play, books, and daily routines, etc).
2. Sabotage the environment: This may sound destructive and mean, but stick with us! Something we often do in our therapy sessions is “sabotage” things. Basically, we make it a little more difficult for your child to independently get the toy or snack they want. This encourages your child to use some form of communication in order to get what they want or need. If you are working on building your child’s use and number of words this is a great strategy to do just that. We will often have our toys in bags or boxes that children need help to open. In order to get the item out that they want or need, they have to ask or tell us (e.g., “I want X”, or “Open box.”). You can do this at home with your child by not immediately getting or opening their snack, filling up their cups, or handing them items. Instead, ask what your child wants, model words and phrases you want them to use, or simply wait to open and/or get toys, food, and activities started until they express their want/need.
3. Wait time: Many times after parents ask a question, they immediately rush to either give their child what they want or tell them the answer. Instead, try giving your child wait time (up to 10 seconds). Giving children this extra time helps them be able to first process what you are asking/telling them and then respond (AKA, language processing skills). It can feel like an eternity waiting for up to 10 seconds, but is so beneficial for your child if they need that time! Don’t always feel the need to fill the void of your child’s silences when they are trying to talk. Sometimes they just need a little more time to get organized.
4. Choices: When your child seems unsure of what they want to say or when your child needs help making a request or answering questions, giving them choices can be very helpful. If you ask your child what they want to eat and they don’t answer or just point, ask “Do you want goldfish or banana?” You can also use this strategy during play (e.g., “Do you want the car or the bus?”) and with books to help your child use more specific vocabulary and to answer questions.
5. Focus on Power Words Not manners: Has your child ever brought you a toy, book, or snack, and just said, “Please?” Although manners are important, many parents focus on these more than helping their child to use specific and intentional vocabulary (or “power words”). Power words are essential to convey meaning. They’re the difference between a child saying, “Help please” versus “Open snack”. Both phrases are 2 words, but one leaves the meaning up to your imagination and the other tells you exactly what you need to know. Many children get stuck on the manners (e.g., please, thank you) and nonspecific vocabulary (more, help, that, there), rather than using high frequency power words (open, push, eat, milk, shoes, trains, dog, etc). Although power words vary from child to child, they are essential to help your child become intentional in their communication. Once they have several power words, it becomes much easier to begin to combine them to help increase the number of words they use to communicate. “Book,” “dog,” and “read” can easily turn into “Read dog book” or “kick,” “blue,” and “ball” can turn into “Kick blue ball.”
Each child varies with both their vocabulary and length of utterance; however, it is important to keep an eye on how many specific words your child has and how many words they typically use to communicate. A small vocabulary or difficulty combining words (see milestones here) can indicate possible difficulties with a child’s motor planning or language skills.
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.
If you read books with your child you have probably noticed they like to read the same ones again and again (…and again and again). Repetition is beneficial to helping children learn; however, it can get boring for the adults in their life. There are many activities you can do that are related to your child’s favorite books. Not only will these activities further develop your child’s language skills, critical thinking abilities and concept knowledge, it can also help maintain your sanity and put a new spin on things. This post is specifically for the book Caps For Sale (don’t worry, we’ll have other books coming up in future posts!).
What you can do while you read the book with your child: Take advantage of this book’s repetitive nature with these ideas, which help build your child’s recall and sequencing skills:
Once your child is more familiar with the book you can encourage them to participate in saying with you, “Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!” You can also see if when you start the sentence, can your child finish it? Can they eventually repeat the whole sentence on their own each time it comes up in the book?
There are a lot of actions in this book. For example the peddler shakes his finger and fist and even stamps his feet. Act these actions out and encourage your child to imitate you.
The monkeys have a part to play too! Have your child act like a monkey in the book when they are imitating the peddler’s actions.
When you finish the story work on sequencing skills by having your child tell you the order in which the peddler stacks the caps. Go back through the book and use pictures if needed to help your child recall details in order to correctly sequence.
Questions you can ask as you read with your child: Asking your child questions during or after a book is important to help build and strengthen comprehension skills, as well as, work on responding to different types of questions.
WHAT questions (e.g., “What is the peddler doing?”; “What is the peddler’s job?”)
WHO questions (e.g., “Who is selling caps?”; “Who took the caps?”)
WHERE questions (e.g., “Where did the peddler rest?”; “Where are the caps?”)
WHY questions (e.g., “Why did the peddler sit down?”; “Why is the peddler upset?”)
HOW questions (e.g., “How do the monkeys get the caps?”; “How does the peddler get his caps back?”)
PREDICTION questions (e.g., “What might happen while the peddler rests?”; “What will the peddler do next time he wants to rest?”)
INFERENCING questions (e.g., “How does the peddler feel?”; “How can you tell the peddler is upset?”)
When your child works on answering questions about a story, it means they are building vocabulary and connections, as well as, critical thinking skills! Fun activities to do after the book: Doing activities related to a book you have read with your child is a great way to continue strengthening language skills. Incorporating activities related to a story help further build your child’s ability to make connections and associations, increase their vocabulary skills, and can also help with ability to recall and sequence information they have learned or been exposed to. You do not need to do all of these activities in one day. Feel free to spread them out over many days or weeks and even repeat them.
Make a picture with the peddler and his caps: You can trace or copy a picture of the peddler with the caps on his head out of the book. Remove or omit the caps on his head. You can make caps (using colored paper) or cut them out if you made a copy of the page. Work on having your child glue the caps back on in the correct order. You can even try this with play-doh to change it up. ** (this activity is good for working on recall of details, sequencing, colors, counting, vocabulary of actions and nouns from the picture)
Instead of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, play Pin the Cap on the Monkey: Make a monkey and some caps (or copy and enlarge pictures from the book) and play away. **(this activity is good for colors, counting and prepositions, i.e., locations, for where the caps end up– “The checkered cap is next to the monkey”, “A blue cap is under the monkey”, “Where is this red cap?”, “Can you find a cap that is below the monkey?”, etc)
Pretend play: make a cap store and pretend to buy and sell hats. You can use dress-up clothes to be the seller and/or the buyer, pretend or real money, and any other accessories you can think of! **(this activity is good for working on pretend play skills, ideation, turn-taking, sharing, problem solving, and also can help reinforce vocabulary and concepts from the book)
As we discussed in this post, at The Speech Space we are huge fans of books. Not only are books a wonderful way to engage and spend time with your child, but they are also a great means for building language skills like vocabulary, critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Adding or incorporating fun activities related to books you read with your child can double the impact (and fun!).
Check back on the blog for more ideas and activities you can do with your child to help encourage their communication development. If you have questions or concerns about your child’s s development, contact us at The Speech Space. We offer free screenings, which take approximately 30 minutes, and can help identify potential problems.
Story telling is such an important part of your child’s life. Think of all the times you’ve asked your child, “What did you do today?” and they’ve replied with “Nothing.” or “I don’t know.” or had no response at all. As your child gets older, the ability to tell stories gets increasingly important.
At The Speech Space, we often hear from parents who want to help develop their child’s story telling skills, so here are some fun and easy ways you can help your child develop this skill.
1. Take pictures: Although this may not be possible to do during school days, weekends are a great time to use our handy iPhones to work on story telling. Use your phone to take pictures throughout a day you spend with your child. At the end of the day, have them go through the pictures and describe the activities. Your activities can be exciting adventures or everyday activities like making breakfast together or brushing teeth. Added bonus- you’ll have lots of pictures for your memory books!
2. Have your child tell you how to do a familiar activity: Most children’s days are based in routine- morning routines, hand washing routines, food routines, bedtime routines- which should be very easy for your child to retell, as they do them every day. Children love to “be the grown up,” so have your child tell you how wash your hands or make their snack. Try to use key words like “first/then/last” or “first/next/last” to help your child become familiar with them in sequence.
3. Act out a familiar story: Does your child love to read some of the same stories over and over again? If so, try to gather some dress up items or use their toy figures to act out the story. You can start by letting your child use the book to help them remember how the story goes, but try working up to them acting out the story without help from you or the book. Demonstrate how you would act out or tell the story and use an expressive voice and face, or over exaggerated movements. Kids love seeing adults get silly, so have fun and make it a great performance
4. Wordless books: While most books have words, there are some that have few to no words in them (Flashlight, Frog Where Are you?, Pancakes for Breakfast, Red Sled). These books are great for young children for several reasons, including story telling. Since the books have no words, it’s easy for your child to use the pictures to help them make up their own story while having a visual guide to keep them on topic. Make sure that your child is using the pictures to help them with their story, using specific vocabulary and staying on topic.These wordless books are also great to focus on details of what is happening in order to make inferences and predictions about the pictures or stories.
As your child grows and moves through school these skills become more and more vital. In their early years, family or teachers may ask what your child did over the weekend or holiday. As they continue through school, your child will be expected to retell stories that are read to them or recall activities from earlier in their day. When your child begins writing tasks, they will be expected to write a cohesive story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Incorporating story telling and sequencing skills into daily routines and activities you already do, makes it easier to work on these skills. We are all about making it as easy as possible to improve your child’s communication skills!
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.
