Parents Are Asking: How Can I Help My Child Build Communication Skills This Spring?

Many of us have had a change of routine during this global pandemic, including parents spending more time at home with their children. We have transitioned many of our clients to teletherapy, but with extra time at home, parents want to know, “How can I help my child build better communication skills?”

If your child is currently receiving speech-language therapy, you ‘re taking a break from services, or you’re just beginning to wonder whether your child would benefit from speech-language therapy, we want to help empower you as a parent. Here are some ideas and strategies to help you support your child in building their communication skills.

ANYTHING can become a speech-and-language-rich activity with a little bit of creativity. Let’s get some fresh air and plant some seeds!

Activity: Support Your Child’s Language Development While Planting Seeds

1.     Introduce New Describing Words

Talk about the steps involved in planting a seed and how to take care of your growing plant. Introduce any new vocabulary at the beginning of the activity (e.g., fertilizer, trowel, soil).

Encourage your child to describe the texture of the soil, what they’re doing, and what they hope will happen as the plant grows. Describe the flow of water (e.g., slow, fast, dripping) as you water the seeds.

Be sure to incorporate any new words in sentences several times throughout the activity.

2.     Practice Your Child’s Target Sounds

As you are planting, identify key words that contain your child’s target sounds. This is pretty straightforward for the S sound (soil, seeds, sun), but you can get creative! Plant in a can if your child is working on the K sound, or plant some rosemary seeds if you’re looking for R practice.

Important things to remember: 

• Repeat words with your child’s target sounds frequently, modeling good speech sounds.

• Make sure you don’t distort the sound or word by over-emphasizing the target sounds.

• Don’t get too hung up on correcting errors – we want this to be a fun and encouraging activity.

• If you notice a correct production of these target sounds, reinforce it by giving specific positive feedback, like "I like how you remembered to say SSSSS in the word seed."

3.     “Recast” and Reinforce Your Child’s Speech

Model the language skills your child is practicing in therapy and “recast” their productions as needed. Recasting is a technique where you repeat what your child said back to them with the error corrected. For example, if your child says “Me digging,” you could say “You are digging, and I am digging too.”

Have fun, and reinforce your child by giving specific positive praise like, “Wow! You used some really great describing words.”

Other Springtime Activities For Children to Practice Speech and Language Skills

If you don’t have anywhere to plant or can’t get your hands on seeds right now, check out these easy plant activities for preschool.

You can also apply the speech and language strategies above to other springtime activities like puddle jumping, making mud pies, or going on a bug hunt. The more you think about and practice ways to support your child’s speech and language development, the more you’ll find that these strategies become second nature.

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to one of our Speech Language Pathologists (SLPs). If you are looking for teletherapy services in Illinois, you can schedule a phone consultation here.