Helping speech and language flourish at home

Speech and language development is comprised of many parts, with daily experiences associating sounds with meaning, words with actions or objects, being a few of the elements which have an impact on a child’s learning.

With many families looking for fun activities to do while at home, Hear and Say’s listening and spoken language specialists have put together some activities that will not only occupy your children, but also help them to develop their listening and spoken language.

Create an obstacle course

This helps with language development by working on the following:

Prepositions: location words such as under and over
Verbs: e.g. walking, jumping and climbing
Problem solving: e.g. How will I get over this obstacle?

Gardening

This helps with language development by:

Exposing children to vocabulary they may not be as familiar with or use every day, e.g. trowel, rake and bulb
Allowing children to predict what will happen next, e.g. watching seedlings sprout

Baking

This helps with language development by:

Thinking about and articulating sequencing, e.g. what tasks they need to do first, next and last
Describing what’s happening or the ingredients used, e.g. adjectives such as wet, dry and sticky

Rainbow game

This game involves finding items to match the colours of the rainbow at home or in the garden. This helps with language development by working on:

Identifying colours
Learning to match objects and apply the same and/or different concepts

Craft with items from the garden

This helps with language development by:

Describing textures, e.g. rough, smooth, soft and hard
Plurals and counting, e.g. How many leaves did we get?

Have you tried any other fun family activities at home? We’d love to hear about them! Please email marketing@hearandsay.com.au with your ideas for entertaining ways to keep speech and language development at home.