Our third series talks about Speech-Language skills and how parents can improve it in their child.
Children in early childhood or preschool age may pose unique hurdles for their parents or caregivers as well as pediatric psychologists. Some children may dislike interacting with new faces while others simply start slow. Hence, finding the right speech enhancement activities can be difficult. This article lists some of the evidence based activities for parents.
Why are speech-language activities important?
Speech Therapy activities are an important part of helping children learn to express themselves. Speech Therapists are trained to design and provide intervention that help resolve language issues in non-verbal autism, normal speech delays and teach the child strategies to calm themselves down before they attempt to communicate again and equip parents with simple activities at home.
What are speech therapy activities parents can use?
The following are speech therapy activities to work on with a child with speech delays at home:
-Play: Parents need guidance on integrating language into play. Children’s psychologists encourage parents to use interactive, turn-taking play such as singing songs, reciting nursery rhymes, or energetic, physical activity but ensure you do all that at eye level with the child!
-Provide Appropriate Reinforcement: Strengthen your child’s communication skills by reinforcing it every time he/she may repeat some actions you did, make sounds, use gestures to communicate and or make eye contact. Remember to use your child’s favorite item as a reward (stickers, other toys), and ensure that the item is not too big.
-Oral-motor activities such as brushing teeth, eating, blowing activities with straws or bubbles can help enhance the communication skills.
-Sing songs with motions to involve their bodies and help understand speech through singing.
-Read Short Stories to enhance communication. Use books in the genre of poetry that has strong rhyming, sing-song cadence, and has lots of photos, pictures, and 3D pop-out characters.
-Encourage writing beginning from something as simple as drawing lines, shapes, and then alphabets to introduce letters and sounds. Writing can be one way to communicate for a child who may have non-verbal autism.
-Parallel Talk can benefit your child’s speech by providing a language-rich environment. You can for instance, narrate your actions as they see you do them.
There are many activities one can use with their children at home or bring into their therapist’s office that can help their children with speech and language skills.
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