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. 

As fall begins, the excitement of Halloween and Thanksgiving will be growing with your young child. Pumpkins are a common theme across many autumnal activities and such activities can help your child’s expressive, receptive, and pragmatic language blossom. Pumpkins have been used for decorating and cooking for centuries and can also be used as a tool to help nurture your child’s language development. Did you know the largest pumpkin on record weighed in at 1,800 lbs? Showing your child pictures of giant pumpkins, going to a local pumpkin patch, or bringing home a pumpkin to decorate will open the door to questions and comments about this fall staple. Your child will enjoy learning all about this seasonal gourd and the activities are endless.

Listed below you will find some examples to help increase specific language areas or general activities that will aid in many areas of language development.

Receptive Language: 

• Have your child follow one-or-two-step verbal directions to decorate a pumpkin
• Read pumpkin stories and ask your child basic who, what, when, where questions. Some great pumpkin-themed books include The Roll-Away Pumpkin by Junia Wonders, How Big Could Your Pumpkin Grow? by Wendell Minor, and How Many Seeds are in a Pumpkin? by Margaret McNamara.

Expressive Language:

• Help your child list the steps necessary to carve a pumpkin or explain how they want to decorate it.
  Example: Step 1. Have mom or dad cut open the pumpkin. Step 2. Use a spoon to clean out the inside of the pumpkin. Step 3. Put the pumpkin insides on a baking sheet. Step 4. Draw a face on the pumpkin. Step 5. Have mom or dad carve out the face on the pumpkin. Step 6. Place a candle inside the pumpkin to see the face light up.
• Label items in the pumpkin books mentioned above. Examples: pumpkin patch, scarecrow, birds, boy, girl, teacher, moon, etc.

Pragmatic Language:

• Identify and discuss the various emotions carved/drawn on pumpkins
• Have your child tell others what they like about their pumpkins

Sensory Exploration:

• Putting hands inside the pumpkin to feel the “guts” and explore new textures
• Make pumpkins out of orange and green play-doh or moon sand
• Use various mini pumpkins or pumpkin toys in a water bin to see if they sink or float

Literacy and Letter Identification:

• “P is for Pumpkin” activity.
  Example: give your child a paper full of various spaced-out letters, similar to a word search. Using an orange dot marker and have your child dot all the P’s they can find.

Music:

• Sing the song “5 Little Pumpkins” to target counting and holiday vocabulary

Children with delays or disorders in expressive and receptive language have difficulty understanding, developing, formulating, and communicating their thoughts, ideas, wants, and needs. This can significantly impact their ability to successfully communicate with others, resulting in communication breakdowns, frustrations, and difficulty developing meaningful relationships and interactions. Luckily, with the support and coaching of your child’s speech-language pathologist and therapeutic team, there are several things that you as parents can do at home to facilitate and promote increased language skills. This blog is all about how you can promote your child’s language skills using your senses.

As children develop, they become explorers of their natural world, experiencing new sights, sounds, smells, and sensations. It’s important to recognize that while children with language and sensory difficulties experience these stimuli in a unique way, the novelty and uncertainty of these experiences provide a wonderful opportunity for you, as a parent and communication partner, to facilitate and promote language use, growth, and development. Thinking about the five senses that each individual has, including sight (vision), hearing (audition), taste (gustation), smell (olfaction), and touch (tactile), you can frame your communication with your children to relate to these senses and promote expanded, meaningful, and novel language use.

Imagine taking your child to the park. It is full of auditory and visual stimuli that may be novel, and perhaps overwhelming if your child has difficulty communicating about what they experience. Narrating your own senses about what you see, what you hear, and what the child is seeing and hearing, you can help promote language development and meaningful interaction. Simple, yet impactful statements pertaining to your senses (e.g., “I see the swings.” “I hear the train.” “I smell the flowers.”) can help encourage language learning and promote the initiation of expressive language in a meaningful way. While at home, opening up the dialogue during meal and snack times is a fantastic way to incorporate language learning and exploration of the five senses. Describing the way a food tastes, the way it smells, the way it feels on your tongue, the sounds it makes when you bite, and the way it looks, sets up your communication environment to not only increase receptive learning but allows for the child to participate in a reciprocal communicative exchange.

Promoting functional language use and setting up exciting and novel opportunities for your child to deepen their receptive and expressive language skills during meaningful activities is a wonderful way to help your child improve their communication skills. Utilizing the five senses to not only narrate, but open the window for reciprocal interaction with your child, is a helpful and functional way to support your child’s language growth. By implementing this strategy across your child’s interests and play activities, you are opening up more opportunities for your child to understand, access, develop, and utilize their language for a rich and robust experience.

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! 

7 Language Facilitation Strategies

Between hectic schedules and the daily bustle of life at home, finding time to build and grow your child’s language can be overwhelming.  This blog gives different language facilitation strategies you can use at home. Finding little moments in your day to connect and play with your child can be the perfect time to build their language.  While using these language facilitation strategies at home, it is important to remember: have fun!  These strategies should not be stressful, for your child or for you.  When sitting down to play with your child, begin by following their lead.  Your child will be most motivated to communicate with you when they are doing what they love.  While you are playing together, practice one (or more!) of these language facilitation techniques.  Try a few and see what works best for you! 

1. Parallel Talk  

• What is it? 

While playing with your child, describe what the child is doing during play. 

• How can I do it at home?  

While playing with cars, you can say “You are driving the red car.  Beep beep.  The car is fast!”

2. Self-Talk  

• What is it? 

While playing with your child, describe your own actions during play. 

• How can I do it at home? 

While playing with blocks, you can say “I am building a tower.  I put blocks on top.  Woah, don’t fall down!” 

3. Expansion 

• What is it? 

Expansion refers to providing a correct, or more mature, version of your child’s spontaneous utterances. 

• How can I do it at home? 

If your child says, “doggy bark,” you can expand their utterance by saying “the doggy is barking.

4.Extension 

• What is it? 

Extension refers to modeling your child’s utterance, while adding more information. 

• How can I do it at home? 

If your child says, “doggy bark,” you can say, “You’re right!  The doggy is barking. He is loud.” 

5. Set up the Environment  

• What is it? 

Set up a situation so that your child must use language to express his/her wants and needs. 

• How can I do it at home? 

Put a favorite toy in a clear container that is difficult to open.  Wait until your child hands you the box and prompt them to say “open” or “help.”   Another way is to keep desired toys or snacks in sight, but out of reach (for example, on a high shelf).  Once they reach for it, prompt your child to ask for the item.

6. Become the “Keeper” 

• What is it? 

While playing with your child, become the “keeper” of preferred toys.  Prompt your child to use language to ask for each toy. 

• How can I do it at home? 

Whether it is legos, toy trains, or a favorite snack, insert yourself into their play by becoming the keeper.  Prompt your child to ask for each toy before handing it over.  This allows for great repeated practice!

7. Cloze Statements 

• What is it? 

To use a cloze statement, say a familiar phrase but leave a word out.  Wait for your child to fill in the blank.  

• How can I do it at home? 

Familiar nursery rhymes or songs are perfect for this strategy. Other examples are common phrases (ready, set, ___!) or phrases with only one response (you sleep in your ___.)

Building language and understanding of “Verbal Behavior” is commonly used in Applied Behavior Analysis to increase language, adaptability, and generalization, and to decrease some challenging behaviors overall. This occurs by building and teaching skills within the world around children. Then, when they are presented with language or certain tasks within daily environments, they will have confidence in completing them and challenging behaviors will be less likely.

As a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, the generalization of language is a daily treatment focus for each child and family. I am often asked, “How can we incorporate this in the home?” or “What activities can we do in the home to support their goals?” Keep in mind that every child has different interests; learning tasks should be entertaining and fun in order to keep engagement!

St. Patrick’s Day is a great time to work on colors and the rainbow with your child. Colors are an important skill set for children to learn due to exposure to them in academic settings, as well as serving to increase their language. For instance, a challenging behavior may be avoided if a child is able to request for “the red lollipop” or even “red” when asked, “What color do you want?”

A fun activity in the home that targets colors can be working with your child to engage in sorting favorite toys, such as Lego’s. Start with just a few colors and add more as they grow more confident! You can make this easier by having one different color block, handing them a block, and having them “match the color” by stacking on the similar color. You can also hold out two options in your hand while playing Legos for the child to choose and match correctly.

If your child is more interested in sensory play such as shaving cream, paint, or water play: colors can be targeted during this play too. Mix shaving cream with food coloring, giving cars baths with different colors of water, or putting different colors of paint in various cups. For children with limited language, you can again continue to build skills by asking, “What color do you want?” before handing them the next cup or color. You can make this easier by asking your child to “show you where blue is” or “give you the blue.”

If your child has mastered labeling plain colors of items you can have them put colors of favorite toys in rainbow order and label them by color, or work on mixing colors. Remember to be creative and have fun! Our world is made of colors!

Dr. Seuss has been a family name for a long time now, and there’s no doubt of his impact on children’s development. Books can be an essential learning tool and a ticket to a faraway fantasy land for every child, but the way Dr. Seuss crafted each of his books has captivated his audiences for very specific reasons. Dr. Seuss’s magic is written in the rhythm, the colors, and the tone and alliterations of each story. Plus, they’re fun for all! If you are a parent struggling to sit down and read a book with your child, just remember what the great Dr. Seuss once said: “You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may!” (Green Eggs and Ham, 1960.) 

Dr. Seuss has been popular for so many years because of his masterful craft. The rhythm of his books help children learn vibrant language that captivates their attention, promoting sustained engagement with an adult. When engaged, adults have the opportunity to support children’s learning of book pragmatics, including how you hold a book, how you read from left to right, how the images relate to the words written, and even more.

Dr. Seuss is also notable for his many made up words throughout his books. These nonsensical words are similar to early childhood language. Rhymes and made up words can also challenge your child to make up their own during song play and storytelling, thus supporting your child’s self-esteem and confidence in cognitive and language abilities. 

Because learning to read can be a challenge for some kids, Dr. Seuss’s ability to include repeated sounds and engaging storylines support children as they connect sounds to letters. But sometimes, getting your child to attend to a book can be the biggest challenge. Dr. Seuss is also known for his use of bright and vibrant colors, which are captivating to young children. Add in your own quirky voices and intonations throughout reading, and you’ll find your child one fascinated audience member.

Dr. Seuss has mastered the ability to teach many lessons while entranced in a story about fictional characters with whacky names, but the most important lesson of all are the life lessons entwined within the pages. Whether it’s What Was I Scared of? or Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, you can always find a meaningful lesson to help your child learn to be themselves, treat others the way you want to be treated, not be afraid to try new things, or to delve into their imaginations. Dr. Seuss’s books will last you a lifetime and each time you read one of his magical stories, you’ll discover brand new lessons. Just remember, “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…” (Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, 1990.)