By: Elyse Schultz M.S, CCC-SLP
Since the onset of Covid-19, our homes have rapidly become more than just a place to lay our heads at night. They have been used as a workspace, playroom, classroom, and so forth for many of us. So many household items can be utilized as therapeutic tools and help carry over speech and language skills. While novel toys can be exciting to a child, look around your home for simple objects. Just about any item can be used in a fun way and prove to be helpful towards reaching your child’s goals! Children do not have to be glued to a screen or have shiny, new toys with bells and whistles in order to have a good time and learn.
What Can You Use?
Inside your home, you can use your child’s most prized possessions, whether it be a game, a toy, or even a book. Using these items provides a great opportunity to work on requesting desired items/actions. You can make a mystery box of fun toys/objects found around the house to target a requesting goal. You can use an empty tissue box or an egg carton to hide the items and give them to the child upon request.
A fun game that hardly gets old is a good old fashioned scavenger hunt. This game is a fun way to target word finding and get your child up and active. You can describe items when given a category, provide a description of how it looks, its function, where you find it, and any other defining features, and then the child has to think of the word, say it, and find the corresponding item. Give your child a turn to be the describer, using multiple adjectives to get you guessing and hunting too!
If you can’t leave a souvenir shop without a refrigerator magnet, you’re in luck! Let your child be a “creative director” of the refrigerator, but you are their hands. They can tell you which magnet to use by describing the magnet and where to put it on the refrigerator using prepositions (e.g., under, on top of, next to, left/right, etc.). Don’t forget to switch roles, where your child is the hands. This allows them to work on comprehension of prepositions and descriptive terms based on your instructions.
Don’t Forget Books!
Other valuable tools you may have in your home are books! Books lay out perfect visuals necessary to assist in story retell, narrative production, sequencing, inferencing, comprehension, and more! You can encourage your child to become inspired and create their own book! All they need is an imagination… and maybe markers and paper if your child is feeling artistic and these are available to you.
The most useful tool you have is each other. It’s a great time to talk about feelings, perspective taking, and flexibility. Discuss what you did that day, what you are going to have for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or summarize your favorite television show, movie, or book. Pretend play also promotes tons of language, whether it is in the expressive, receptive, or social language domains. So, gather your child’s favorite items, get on the floor, and generate as many pretend play schemas as your imagination allows.
For more information on when and how to incorporate speech and language into everyday activities, click here