Holiday traditions provide a great context for helping your child develop language skills. This blog gives some ideas of language activities to try during the holidays to help promote language skills. Whether your child is participating in a long-standing family tradition or you are starting a new one, consider these language activities for your child:

Looking at Holiday Lights Displays: 

• For a younger child: Work on labeling items, responding to pointing, or expanding utterances. Point to specific items of interest and label them (e.g., reindeer, candy cane). You can respond to your child’s pointing by labeling what he/she is pointing at. If your child is using single words to label, you can add a word to make their utterance longer. For example, if your child says “Snowman!” you can respond with “Happy snowman!” or “Big snowman!” 
• For an older child: Play a silly sentence game. Make a sentence about the light display but substitute in a nonsense word. See if your child can fix the silly mistake. For example, “The snowman is under the grass.” or “There is an elephant on the roof.” Then see if your child can make a silly sentence for you to correct. 

 Lighting the Menorah: 

• For a younger child: Allow your child to place the unlit candle into the menorah. You can introduce simple action words such as get or push or you can encourage them to ask for help if they cannot place the candle themselves. 

• For an older child: Narrate what you are doing when you are lighting the menorah. Emphasize temporal concepts (first and next) and directional concepts (left, middle, and right) as you place and light the candles. See if your child can give you directions of how to light the candles after you have done it a few days. 

 Singing Holiday Songs: 

• For younger child: If your child enjoys hearing you sing, you can work on requesting continuation of an activity. Stop in the middle of the song and encourage your child to request continued singing by giving eye contact, vocalizing, or asking for “more” or “sing.” 
• For an older child: See if your child can “catch the mistake” in a song. Sing a well-known carol but substitute a non-rhyming word in place of a rhyming word. For example, “Dashing through the snow, in a one horse open sleigh. O’er the fields we go, laughing all the go.” 

 Decorating a Christmas Tree: 

• For a younger child: Target directional concepts. Ask your child, “Should I put this ornament above the tinsel or below the tinsel?” or “Should I put the star on the top or on the bottom?” while showing them what each directional word means. 
• For the older child: Practice describing ornaments by word features. Have the child say the shape, size, color, material it’s made of, and parts. You can play a guessing game where the child describes clues about an ornament, and you guess which one he/she is describing. 

 Making Holiday Crafts 

• For the younger child: Practice requesting. Provide your child with all necessary materials but leave one item out. Encourage them to make sure they have all the items they need and have them ask questions if they do not have everything. 
• For the older child: Work on narrative skills. Have your child pretend they are leading a how-to TV show. Have them use the words first, next, then, and last to give at least four steps. Build the craft yourself and see if the directions are clear enough to be followed, encouraging your child to clarify communication breakdowns if needed. 

Exploring the senses of vision, smell, taste, touch, and hearing allows many opportunities to target language skills. This blog’s purpose is to give tips on how to target language skills while exploring with your senses. Here are some ways for you to develop your child’s vocabulary and sentence structure while learning about how our bodies work to do some amazing things! 

1. See: Look through picture books that contain scenes, such as I SPY or Can You See What I See? books. Model for your child how to say, “I see ….” You can also ask, “Do you see a …?” If your child is speaking in sentences, you can describe an item by color, size, etc. and see if he/she can guess what you are looking at. 
2. Smell: When cooking or eating a meal, sniff each ingredient or food. If your child will close his/her eyes, you can have him/her guess what food it is.
3. Taste: While eating a meal or snack, provide your child with some opposite words to describe how the food tastes. Examples include: salty vs. sweet vs. sour, spicy vs. not spicy, hot vs. cold.
4. Touch: Explore the textures in your home. Have your child feel a few smooth items (e.g., table, ball) and then have him/her feel some bumpy/rough items (e.g., woven dishtowel, bottom of a shoe). You can use textures to teach the concepts of same and different (e.g., “These feel the same, but these feel different.”). 
5. Hear: Search the internet for audio or video clips of different sounds (e.g., animal noises, vehicle sounds, instruments). Play the sound for your child without letting him/her see what it is. Have him/her guess what is making the sound by saying “I hear a …” You can also search google for “animal sounds” and find some neat ones there!

There are a number of books written about the five senses, which can further help expose your child to new vocabulary covered during their exploration of the senses. You can use the sentence stem “I use my ___ to ___” to review what your child has learned. You can expand on what you have learned about the body parts used for the five senses (eyes, ears, tongues, hands, and noses) by talking about more body parts. For example, you might talk about why we use our feet, our brains, our arms, or our lips. Happy exploring!