Speech Therapy Activities You Can Do At Home
Whether you are trying to increase the effectiveness of actual therapy, or just want to improve your child’s progress in school, there are a lot of speech therapy activities that you can do at home to help out. No matter what age your children are, making speech therapy activities fun and enjoyable will keep their interest longer. Use bright colours and pictures for writing and images. Black and white is dull and gets boring fast. Bring on the coloured markers and look for big bright pictures in books, flash cards or worksheets.
Talk to Your Kids
That seems like a no-brainer, but the more you talk to your kids, and keep good speech patterns in mind when you do it, the better their own speech will become. Young children learn the best through imitation and if your own pronunciations and sentence structures are lacking, theirs will be too.
Read to them often. Reading doesn’t have to be something you just do at night to get them to go to sleep. Settle in for a nice afternoon on the weekend and share a favourite book with them. Keep it age appropriate and ramp up the fun levels by creating the character voices. Encourage your child to repeat words and sentences after you. When you have finished a portion of the book, ask them what it means. Depending on their age, you can ask them what a sentence means, a paragraph, or even wait until the end of the book and ask them what the story was about. Doing this simple little exercise will help them develop better comprehension skills that will follow them all through life.
Relate Speech Therapy Activities to Things They Love
If your child is a sports fanatic, buy or create flash cards with symbols of their favourite games, or activities on them. Read them stories related to the things they like. If they find dinosaurs fascinating, bring on the science fiction. The more you can make the things you talk about, practice and read to them interesting, the more impact it will have.
Younger children may have trouble with connecting ideas and thoughts to real life. Use toys and action figures to create the conversations in a fun and engaging way. There is no rule that says speech therapy activities can’t be fun and playful. In fact, the more fun they are, the better the results will be.
