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Many "grown-ups" often ask..."What can I do to help improve my child's speech and language skills?" Talking together during ANY activity counts. Narrate everything you are doing. Of course, playing board or card games and playing with toys together but so does taking a bath, cooking, eating, and getting dressed, as long as you’re talking together. So does getting the mail, watching Daddy cut the grass, riding in the car, and digging around the pots and pans in the kitchen cabinets, as long as you’re talking together. Any activity counts as long as you and the child are both tuned in to each other, using words, and sharing the experience. One of the easiest ways to model language and communication skills is to go out of your way to engage your child in play and during everyday routines.
Here are a few other suggestions grown-ups can do to help foster speech and language skills:
Talk about where things are: using words like first and last, right and left, up and down, between, above.
Talk about categories, like fruits, furniture, shapes, indoor and outdoor activities. Sort items by category and talk about which item doesn't belong and why.
Read a story and ask who, what, when, where or why/how questions.
Practice answering wh- questions with personal information that is meaningful to the child. "Who is your teacher?", "What is your mom/dad/grown up's name? ", "Where do you live?", "What school do you go to?" (This is important information for your child to know for safety purposes too!)
Play games like "I Spy" and describe something you see using it's attributes(small, round), function(what it's used for) and location of where you might find it. Have your child guess what it is. Then let your child describe something and YOU take a turn guessing what they are talking about.
Let your child explain the steps of how to do something. (brush their teeth, etc). Get in the kitchen and follow a recipe together. This is one of my favorite activities to do! There are so many speech and language skills you are working on when following a recipe AND you've got a yummy treat when you're done! It can be as simple as making a PB&J sandwich. Start with what ingredients and utensils you will need. Sequence the steps of "how to". You can expand on this by making the steps as specific as you can or turn it into written language(BONUS!!!) and have your child write down the steps first and then you read it and follow it exactly as it is written. Warning!! This can get silly!!! 🤣
Write down a story that they tell you.
Play a board or card game.
Have your child plan daily activities, such as, writing a shopping list for the grocery store or planning a birthday party(who would you invite?, where is the party?, when is the party?, what will you eat? what activities will you do during the party?)
Ask their opinions and preferences. Let them make choices!
Practice saying speech sounds in a mirror.
"Do your part" during everyday activities. Give the child their own jobs/responsibilities that are related to the routine. This helps them link meaning with words, teaches them to follow directions and increases their comprehension/understanding of key words. "Tell him" by stating your request, "show him" by providing visual cues and "help him" by modeling(doing it yourself) and providing gentle physical guidance to help them complete the task. Some children may need your assistance multiple times before being able to do it independently.
Let them order and answer the server when you go out to eat at a restaurant.
PLAY, PLAY, PLAY
Let's talk about LITERACY!!!
Reading WITH your child is one of the BEST ways to work on several executive functioning skills(attention, memory, active listening etc), literacy AND so many SPEECH AND LANGUAGE SKILLS. Dialogic reading is an interactive method of reading aloud to children. It encourages them to participate and become storytellers. Children are prompted to answer questions, describe pictures, and predict what might happen next, rather than passively listening. Dialogic reading has been shown to improve oral language, listening comprehension and socio-emotional skills for all ages by learning/using new vocabulary words, understanding time(winter, morning) and spatial concepts(under, next to) describing the "big picture", discussing and making predictions about story events(what do you think will happen), problem solving, describing characters(brave, smart) and discussing their emotions/feelings. During my therapy sessions I prefer to combine a narrative language approach where we focus on the structure/sequence and elements of storytelling(characters, setting, problem) with dialogic reading techniques. This makes it easy to target multiple speech/language goals and objectives all at once! More discussion and specifics about this to come...
Below are links to find lists of books to target specific goals.
***While these are explanations and suggestions I completely understand time, energy, and resources can be limited. PLEASE, PLEASE never underestimate the power and importance of just taking a few minutes to read a book with your child without all the questioning/practicing, etc....Your presence, engagement and connection with your child away from technology and every day distractions even if for a few moments will go a long way and because sometimes it's nice to JUST LISTEN. ❤️
Meredith Avern from Peachie Speechie is a fantastic resource! She creates videos explaining how to make each sound along with strategies to help you practice the sound with your child. There are also videos explaining language concepts and fluency strategies(stuttering). She provides a printable worksheet you can download for free. You can find those videos and worksheets here:
Find word lists to help your children practice for every speech sound here:
https://www.home-speech-home.com/speech-therapy-word-lists.html
The latest evidence-based strategy is called high-intensity modeling. In everyday language, it means you say the word/phrase you want a child to repeat frequently so that they hear it over and over again. Just to give you an idea...Recent research by The Vault Method suggests 9 times per minute. That's a lot of repetition! Doing this helps to create new and strengthen neural pathways in the brain.
What's the word??
Learning new vocabulary words is absolutely crucial for effective communication and overall language comprehension/understanding. Not only to understand what you are reading but also to understand and follow spoken conversations. Having a broad vocabulary also allows a child to effectively express their thoughts.
Try these things to increase your child's VOCABULARY skills:
Don’t be afraid to repeat those words- repetition is important! (Remember that high-intensity modeling I was talking about?)
Keep your child actively engaged. TALK AND DO! Engaged learners will retain more information!
If reading a story aloud, stop and have active discussions about new unfamiliar words. It’s okay to take lots of time to finish the story, even across a couple of days.
Have your child say the word aloud multiple times- this is called “phonological rehearsal”.
Have your child "write out" the vocabulary target word in a cookie sheet of sand or shaving cream. Try RAINBOW WRITING to make it extra fun! 🌈
Have your child draw a picture on an index card to explain the definition of the word. Keep the picture card and collect them and review them.
Make sure to explain the definition in child-friendly terms.
Have your child generate their own sentence and definition(their kid friendly definition works just as well) using the vocabulary word.
Act out the word’s meaning. Play charades!
Talk about word relationships synonyms(means the same thing), antonyms(means the opposite), or multiple-meaning words(bark means the sound a dog 🐶 makes "woof". Bark also means the hard outer layer/covering of a tree .)
Discuss relationships and similarities/differences between vocabulary words.
Print out a picture of an object (to represent the vocabulary word) and color it or paint it!
Use VISUALS, VISUALS, VISUALS(the written word, the typed word and pictures help to link it to meaning and store it in your memory.
What is the difference between Pragmatic Language Skills and Social Language Skills?
The importance of learning CATEGORIES:
Understanding and using categories is foundation for how we learn, relate, store and recall words. Categorization helps children:
organize their thoughts
increases understanding and use of vocabulary words
improves word retrieval(being able to recall words)
understand the relationships between objects and words
Different types of categorization skills include:
Category Sorting: group items with shared features. (i.e. Sorting words/pictures of fruits and vegetables, indoor and outdoor activities, farm animals and ocean/water animals.)
Category Naming: to expand vocabulary skills. (i.e "What category/group do chair, desk, couch and table belong to?" "Furniture!")
Describing by Category: Encourages students to use semantic features, as opposed to only naming an item
Comparing and Contrasting: supports higher-level thinking skills (analyzing, evaluating, problem solving) and increases expressive language (i.e. same and different). Who remembers Venn Diagrams? 👇🏼 🙋♀️
Whole Body Listening
Listen with your eyes, ears, body, brain, hands, feet and mouth
These are the parts of the body to being a whole-body listener:
Eyes are looking
Ears are listening
Body is facing the speaker
Brain is paying attention and thinking about what the speaker is saying
Hands and feet are still and to yourself
Mouth is quiet
Auditory Attention
Let's be honest...we are living in a busy, busy world these days with a ton of visual and auditory stimulation coming from all different directions sometimes all at once. This requires us to focus, actively listen and filter out what's important and what's not. As I am sitting here typing this from home during the summer my phone rings, my email pings, text message alerts sing, computer calendar dings and notifications from my smart watch sounds off. My dishwasher/air conditioner/fans are humming, the tv is playing in the background, the ice maker dumps ice, my dog barks at the FedEx delivery person, the construction crew is hammering away, and my hubs comes barreling upstairs from his office asking what we are having for lunch. Whew...That could be a lot of distractions! Auditory Attention is the ability to attend to auditory stimuli. It is the MOST foundational component of auditory processing which is how our central nervous system takes in information. If auditory processing is weak a person can physically hear the sounds but a breakdown occurs in their ability to interpret sounds and language.
Try some of these activities/strategies to help improve ATTENTION and listening skills:
Encourage Whole Body Listening
Play Simon Says
Play Red light, Green Light
Play musical chairs
Play the telephone/whisper down the lane game
"Radar focus"-using a paper towel roll or their hands as a "pretend telescope" and have the child focus on the person talking until they are finished speaking
"Zap" If environmental stimuli causes distractions pretend to zap it away
Encourage "waiting" for the directions to be completed before starting a task
Get your child's attention by calling their name before trying to maintain it
Providing a structured task with a definite ending, (i.e. completing a puzzle)
Use visual timers!!! (Game changer, especially if the child can not tell time)
Verbal and visual cues help a child stay focused on the task
Articles and books regarding screen time and the impact on speech, language and communication skills and socioemotional skills:
Articles and books regarding screen time and the impact on speech, language and communication skills and socioemotional skills:
- The Anxious Generation by Jonathon Haidt
Other helpful resources:
https://www.stutteringhelp.org/
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/37c3b35d-f2e5-4948-9934-01a8675b5212 (For gestalt language learners, you can find any script!)
https://www.meaningfulspeech.com/
https://speechandlanguageathome.com/
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