Games
How You Can Support and Encourage Speech and Language Skills at Home
Using Board Games and Other Fun Activities
Below are suggested board games that you can use and instructions on how to use them to promote fun and engaging ways to work on speech and language skills.
For Articulation Skills – choose the target sound or sounds your child is currently working on. You could also add sounds that they have previously worked on to maintain that acquired skill. You can refer to your child’s Speech Book to gage what sound(s) to target.
Connect Four, Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders and any other games you may have that requires turn taking: Before taking a turn, your child has to say a word or sentence with their target sound correctly before they can take a turn. Model the correct sound for them if they do not produce it correctly the first time.
For Fun, you can also pick two target words a day that your child has to say and/or use in a sentence correctly at least 5X during the day (total of 10). To motivate your child you could give stickers, special snacks, permission to do an activity they really want to do, or perhaps a favorite bed-time story or two!
You can also have your child find at least 3 things in your home that has their target sound in its name. They can find an item that has their sound in the beginning of the name, the middle of name and then at the end of the name. For example, /s/oap, gla/ss/es and shoe/s/.
For Language Skills- these following games can be used. All games require social pragmatic skills such as turn taking, active listening to the speaker and sustained joint attention.
Guess Who: This can be played to work on reasoning, describing (adjectives), answering/asking questions and vocabulary.
Head Bandz: This is a great game to target a variety of language skills, such as describing (using adjectives, functions of objects, categorical labels), asking/answering questions and vocabulary. You can also add/create your own cards and add family members, favorite characters and/or TV shows. Spend time drawing and coloring these new cards while playing music in the background (no need for screens when being creative 😊)
Scattegories: This game is great for vocabulary building and categorization skills. Rapid naming activities help to build and strengthen connections in the brain to connect concepts and ideas.
Apples to Apples: This game focuses on skills such as word relationships, describing, comparing/contrasting and vocabulary.
Additional activities that can be done at home to enhance speech and language
Scavenger Hunt: You can have a scavenger hunt inside or out (maybe both). Your focus of the scavenger hunt could be items that belong to the target sound your child is working on, things within a given category or begin with a particular letter sound. Use your imagination and perhaps a competition between siblings. You can use tangible items or pictures of items. Add clues to the game and wake those little brains up.
Cooking: This is always a great activity to share with children. Following a recipe requires understanding and using sequencing concepts (i.e. first, second, next, then, last, before and after), concepts of measuring quantity and vocabulary (pour, mix, shake, bake, oven, stove, wooden, plastic, metal, glass, utensils/dishes). Cooking is jam packed with language, fun and its tasty too!
Simon Says: An oldie but a goodie. This game targets active listening skills and following directions.
Sorting items: Gather items that you have at home and direct your child(ren) to sort them according to however you wish them to sort. For example, it could be by size, color, function, where you in the house it is used, by initial sound (begins with /b/, /t/ etc.) or alphabetical order. Be creative.