With the school holidays and Easter just around the corner, many families are away on holidays and may be taking a break from their regular speech therapy appointments. However, it is important to keep up with your child’s speech goals during the break because consistency is important for achieving those goals. To assist with this, I have created a few speech and language games that can be incorporated with some fun Easter activities.
Easter Egg Hunt
An Easter egg hunt is a great way to get into the Easter spirit and continue to work on a range of speech goals over the holidays. For the little ones that are working on basic prepositions (e.g. in, on, under) and spatial concepts (e.g. between, in front of), clues that incorporate these concepts as part of the activity are a good way to teach and strengthen their understanding of the concepts. For example, if the target concept was ‘under’, hide a handful of eggs underneath different objects (e.g. a tree, a chair, a basket etc.) Before the egg hunt begins, whisper the clue into the child’s ear (e.g. under the chair, under the tree) and then begin the hunt. Do not forget to provide the additional gestures, signs and prompts required to assist your child in understanding the concepts (as recommended by your regular speech pathologist). This activity can also be used to improve expressive language such as responding to ‘wh’ questions (e.g. who, where, what). By placing multiple eggs in one spot, your child can then tell someone elsewhere they found the eggs and use those language concepts in their own vocabulary.
Painting Easter Eggs
Painting hard-boiled eggs or sorting through chocolate eggs after an egg hunt can be a great way to work on dimensional concepts (e.g. shapes, sizes and colours) in conjunction with speech sounds. This can be done just as a fun chatting activity while painting or after the egg hunt. If they had a chance to participate in the hunt with other children, come together and discuss the different types of eggs that were found. For example, you could say “I found a big egg, did you find a big egg too?” and see if they are able to find one in their bunch that is also big. Similarly this can be done with colours while painting the eggs, which allows for speech sounds to be targeted at the same time as a range of speech sounds are present in the colour names (e.g. ‘g’ for ‘green’, ‘r’ for ‘red’).
Preparing Egg Baskets
Preparing Easter egg baskets can be a good way to work on identifying and categorising word groups. This can be done by starting with a large bag of mixed eggs and identifying different ways to prepare and hand out the Easter eggs. For example you can get your child to group the eggs by size, colour, print, shape and describe why those eggs belong together and who the eggs will be given to. For example they may choose to group all the blue eggs together and all the pink eggs together. Then they might explain that the blue egg basket is for their male sibling whose favourite colour is blue and the pink egg basket is for their female sibling whose favourite colour is pink.
For more information on this topic or any speech related fields, contact the ENT Clinic on 1300 123 368 and make an appointment with our speech pathologists Ashleigh Fattah or Jenna Butterworth.
