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 Harry the Dirty Dog (don’t worry, we’ll have other books coming up in future posts).
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. Depending on the type of questions you ask your child, you can also work on their critical thinking skills as well.
WHAT questions (e.g., “What did Harry hide?”; “What did Harry do to try and get his family to recognize him?”)
WHO questions (e.g., “Who doesn’t want to take a bath?”; “Who will give Harry a bath?”)
WHERE questions (e.g., “Where did Harry bury his brush?”; “Where did Harry go when he ran away?”)
WHY questions (e.g., “Why doesn’t Harry’s family recognize him?”; “Why did Harry run away?”)
HOW questions (e.g., “How did Harry get so dirty?”; “How did Harry get his family to recognize him again?”)
PREDICTION questions (e.g., “Will his family recognize him?”; “What might happen because Harry looks so different?”, “Harry’s feeling hungry now. What might he do?”)
INFERENCING questions (e.g., “How does the Harry feel?”; “How would you feel if someone you know didn’t recognize you?”)
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 their 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.
Bake Cookies: Bake your favorite cookies (or just some that are simple) together and make them into different shapes from the story– dogs, brushes, dog bones. You can even decorate the dog shapes to make some look dirty and some clean! This activity is good for recalling details of the story, using vocabulary and focusing on similarities and differences when decorating the cookies
Play Hide-and-Seek with a Brush: Hide a brush or scrubbing brush in your house and give your child clues to help them find where you hid the brush. You can take turns and have your child hide the brush and give you clues to find it as well. This activity is good for working on building vocabulary and concepts because of the need to use descriptions and preposition (location) vocabulary (under, above, in between, next to, etc)
As we’ve talked about before, 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!). If you missed our other recent book posts, you can read them here and here.
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.
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.
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.
The use of technology with children is something a lot of parents debate over. We are here to help you figure out this conundrum!
The American Academy of Pediatrics recently updated their recommended guidelines on this very topic. You may be surprised that your child should not have ANY screen time before 18 months of age (with the exception of video chatting with family and friends). While there are times when 100% pure distraction is critical (like visiting grandparents a plane ride away), this should be a rare exception. Before your child turns 3, they are not really registering the content of the shows, just the highly addictive, constantly changing colors, noises, and shapes. Read below for the updated guidelines put out by the American Academy of Pediatrics:
Children younger than 18 months:
Avoid use of screen media other than video-chatting
Children 18 to 24 months of age:
Parents who want to introduce digital media should choose high-quality programming, and watch it with their children to help them understand what they’re seeing
For children ages 2 to 5 years:
Limit screen use to 1 hour per day of high-quality programs. Parents should co-view media with children to help them understand what they are seeing and apply it to the world around them.
For children ages 6 and older:
Place consistent limits on the time spent using media, and the types of media, and make sure media does not take the place of adequate sleep, physical activity and other behaviors essential to health.
Designate media-free times together, such as dinner or driving, as well as media-free locations at home, such as bedrooms.
Have ongoing communication about online citizenship and safety, including treating others with respect online and offline.
The Georgetown Early Learning Project is another amazing source of information. Dr. Rachel Barr and her team have gathered extremely important and significant information about early child development and screen time. Below are some quick take-away points from their information:
Co-viewing with your child is vital for their engagement and language development
Screens should be shut off 1 hour before bedtime to help promote good sleeping habits (the lights from screens can contribute to sleep disruption–this goes for adults too!)
Set clear guidelines (and a timer if needed) to end screen time– and be consistent.
Children 5 years and younger learn through interactions and joint engagement, not through watching and/or clicking on a screen.
Children 0-6 months of age are really into faces, so no need to even have a screen on for them!
At 6 months old children can recognize pictures, but can’t yet make the reference or association of them (meaning they can’t transfer what they see from a screen to real life).
Children from 9-12 months may seem super “focused” or “engaged” during screen time, but they are not truly getting the content of what they are seeing. Instead what is keeping their attention is the constant and frequent changes in features on the screen (e.g., noise, volume, light, pictures, etc). The people that produce these shows or games know exactly what they are doing to keep your child glued to the screen, but what they are seeing is not actually helping their development at all.
At 3 years old children are actually able to transfer what they see or watch on a screen to real life.
Shows with “real life things”, like Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street, are what children actually connect to
We hope you find this quick outline of guidelines and information helpful when making your plan of attack with screen time!
The Speech Space is giving away a free evaluation, in recognition of May being “better speech and hearing” month! Enter via email at info@thespeechspacedc.com by Monday May 15th. The winner will be emailed on Tuesday May 16th. If you are having concerns about your child’s development this is a perfect opportunity to get some answers and make a plan.
Spring Break is coming up in DC! School breaks can be an amazing opportunity to spend time with your child and make sure they’re getting a language rich experience. Often parents feel overwhelmed with choices or may not have many ideas of what to do. You don’t have to go on a trip to make this break an exciting time, and depending on your family dynamics, you may need to stay close to home. Staycations can be fun and give you the opportunity to connect with your child. We’re here to give you some easy and fun ideas of things you can do during your staycation to have fun and really encourage your child’s language development.
Monday: Library and Books
1. Talk about libraries:
What is inside libraries
Who works there
What kinds of things can you do in a library (e.g., read, listen to stories, check out books.)
What are the appropriate voice levels at the library (inside vs outside voices)
How we check out books
Giving your child a “preview” about what you may see and do will give them a lot of the vocabulary that is used in libraries. Also, when you prepare your child for the experiences they are about to have, they’ll feel more confident talking about what they see.
2. Discuss how you’ll get to the library. Modes of transportation are almost always an interesting topic for children. Although you may live close to a library, perhaps you’re going to a new library that day for a specific story time or group activity. Will you drive? Walk? Bike? If you live in DC, will you metro? Although grown-ups can get tired of the metro system, it’s usually a novel and exciting experience for kids and gives your child a lot to talk about (taking escalators, metro cards, what lines will you take, what stop will you get off, etc).
4. While you travel to the library, talk about what kinds of books your child might like and how you will go about finding them. Maybe you’ll ask the librarian or look it up on a computer in the library. Also, talk about how many books you will check out.
5. Once you’re done and home, talk about all the steps you took to get to the library. Discuss what you saw, what you did, and what you got. Parents often ask their children, “What did you do today?”, when they have been at school, but it’s just as important to ask this same question when you’ve been with your child all day. It makes it easier to help them recall the sequence and details of events and helps get rid of the “I don’t know” answer since you can help them remember!
Tuesday: Indoor Pools or Water Play Day
In DC, there are a few indoor water parks; however, if you live in a warmer climate or if the weather if the weather during Spring Break is nice, you may just want to keep the water fun in your own backyard! Either way, there is so much language associated with water play to bring out language in kids.
1. If you are going to a pool, the first thing to talk about is how we interact with water. It’s always a good idea to review how we play in and around water. See how many rules or ways we play in the water (wearing floaties, making sure parent is around in the water, no running on the pool deck, etc.) your child can name. This is a good way to see how much your child remembers about water rules.
2. Whether you are going to the pool or doing water play at your house, you and your child can work on building their vocabulary and association concepts during your water play day.
Talk about attributes of water (e.g., cold, wet, deep, shallow)
What we wear in water
Different bodies of water (pool vs. ocean vs. lake, etc)
The different things you can see in these bodies of water (e.g.. if heading to a pool, lifeguards)
If you are going to the pool, what do you need to bring with you (towels, bathing suits, any pool toys, etc)
3. Some kids have difficulty understanding and using negatives correctly (e.g., not, no, none). To target negatives, you can play a sorting game with your child. You can pull some items from around your house and decide if they can go in the water or if they cannot go in the water (this may vary depending on if you are going to a pool or doing water play at home). Then your child can pull out items (either the same ones you did or new ones) and decide if the items go in the water or not. Some examples could be: clothing items, stuffed animals, cars, bath toys, food items. You can talk about if they DO or DO NOT go in water.
4. If you are doing water play at home, you can use this opportunity to work on language concepts to help build your child’s vocabulary. Maybe your child wants to pretend they are in the arctic during their water play– what animals would they see, what would the water feel like, you could even add ice cubes to make it cold or use as glaciers! You can do this for other bodies of water too and add items that go with them (e.g., ocean, lake, pond). This activity is great for building your child’s vocabulary skills by giving opportunities for working on category and association concepts, comparing and contrasting, and even attributes (color, shape, size, number).
Wednesday: Parks and Playgrounds
1. Start this activity by talking about which park is your child’s favorite. Every park has so many different features, you can compare/contrast equipment in various parks (e.g.,”They both have slides, but this one has a merry-go-round and that one has swings.”).
2. Once you decide where to go, describe all the parts of the park. Are there sidewalks? What’s on the ground? Think of all the pieces of play equipment. Is it big or small? What colors are there on the play equipment?
3. Discuss how you’ll get there and the steps you take to get to the park. Will you drive or walk or bike or scooter? What do you need for each of these?
.4. Maybe you’ll decide to have a snack or lunch while you are at the park or playground. If so, you can have your child help you prepare and pack your snack or lunch. While doing this you can work on categories (fruits vs. vegetables; drinks vs. foods, etc), comparing/contrasting (e.g., “The fruit snacks are red and the carrots are orange.”) and even sequencing (e.g., while you prepare the sandwich together talk about all the steps you are doing to make the sandwich: first we get out the bread, what do we do next?).
5.. As you’re on the way to the park or playground, describe the things that you see. You can play “I Spy” as you go to draw your child’s attention to what’s in the sky or on the ground or in the street.
Thursday: Cooking
Cooking is a great way to help your child work on sequencing and retelling activities in a hands on way, plus, it can get you to the store to do your grocery shopping!
1. Start by picking one or two (easy) things to make. Fruit salad, cookies, smoothies,or chex mix are some easy and safe things to try out for first time chefs.
2. Make a list of all the ingredients you’ll need for each thing you’ll make. We like to try to draw pictures of the items when we cook, although neither of us are great artists! It will help your child to retell and sequence with pictures, so try it out if you can.
3. Next, go to the store. Give your child 2 items to go find for your recipes (on the aisle you are on). If they find those, see if they can get 3 items. Making this a game will help keep them busy and help them to work on following directions with multiple concepts.
4. When you get home, get the recipe(s) and have your child gather the ingredients as you read them, or vice versa. As you begin ‘cooking,’ try to use sequence words (first, second, third; first, next, last; first, then;before, after, etc) and give 1 or 2 steps at a time (depending on what your child can do). For example: “First wash the strawberries and then cut them.” (for cutting, we like these knives)
5. Having your child tell you what things are used to perform certain tasks is another good language activity (e.g., “What do we use to cut the fruit?”, “What do we use to bake the cookies?”). Or, have them get things in categories (“Get all the fruit.” or “Get all the utensils.”, etc).This will help your child begin to think of objects in different ways, build associations, as well as, their vocabulary.
6. When you’re ready to eat, try to work on describing the foods. You can use categories, color, taste, size, temperature, and/or texture. Then, bon appétit!
Friday: Around the House
There are some common items around your house that kids will love to play with. Feel free to experiment and see what piques your child’s interest and creates the most language-rich experiences.
1. Shaving cream is one of our favorites. Most children really love squishing their hands in shaving cream and there’s a lot to talk about as they do. The color, how it feels, what you could pretend that it is, what you can draw in it…the list could go on and on! We love to put small animal toys and pretend it’s snow, or drive cars through shaving cream and pretend it’s a car wash, or draw in it (a great way to practice making letters or shapes).
2. Water in a tub or bucket is another great idea. Kids love water for some reason (unless they have to take a bath!). Get bowls, measuring cups, lids- anything around the house that could scoop up water. You can also do experiments with various objects (e.g., coins, tissues, pencils, figurines, blocks) to see which items float and which ones do not
3. Tape is surprisingly exciting to use in order to make pictures or just to play with. We like the Washi tape or duct tape with different patterns to make pictures. You can put them on paper or make designs on the sidewalk. Have them tell you about the colors, shapes, or designs they make.
4. If it’s a nice day and you have a good patch of sidewalk or walkway in front of where you live, grab some chalk and go outside! We like to play hop-scotch, which is a fun way to work on counting! You and your child can draw the hop-scotch squares together or you can each have your own hop-scotch squares. You can also take the opportunity to work on things like categories (e.g., “Let’s draw zoo animals” or “Let’s draw some food for our outside pretend snack! Should we draw vegetables or desserts?”,), attributes (i.e., colors, shapes, size, number), prepositions (e.g., “Let’s draw a sun above our flowers.”, “Our house needs a door. Should we put it under the windows or next to the windows?”),
5. Build a marble tower out of recyclable materials around your house! Think of all those paper towel rolls, toilet paper rolls, yogurt containers, bubble wrap, boxes and other things you collect over just one week. You and your child can work together to build your very own, homemade marble tower. This activity is really great for problem-solving, team work, making predictions, coming up with solutions and getting creative. You can even YouTube a video before you start building so your child can get excited and inspired about the different possibilities.
We hope you and your family have a great Spring Break! Maybe you have some favorite staycation ideas you and your child do together? Feel free to share your ideas in our comments section.
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.
