Tips to Share With Parents: Fun Ways to Get Kids Back In Learning Mode

As summer winds down, parents might look for ways to help their kids get back into the swing of school, including working on speech or language goals. Help caregivers take advantage of these last weeks of summer with easy activities that organically incorporate speech-language practice into daily routines. Here are the tips I share with parents any time of year, but especially in summer when they spend more time with their kids: Books. This is my number-one suggestion. Reading with your child is a great way to target language. Go to the library and spend time comparing different books, putting them into categories and voting on one to take home. Or revisit old favorites by making up a new story without using the words on the page. Stop as you read and ask questions about what comes next or relate it to an experience in your own lives. Work on social skills by role-playing based on characters’ actions and then see how they can do it differently next time. Car games. Going on a road trip? Just stuck in beach traffic? Turn it in to a language activity. If your kids are working on sounds, play “I Spy” with their target sound or work on repetition by playing a game like the license plate game. Practicing categories also fits in easily with the alphabet game—for example, “A, my name is Anna and we live in Alabama, B, my name is Brenda and we live in Baltimore,” and so on. You can also create a group story. One person starts with once upon a time and everyone ta...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Tags: Schools Slider Speech-Language Pathology Language Disorders Speech Disorders Source Type: blogs