This week, I’m going to continue talking on how I was able to use soap and water and other items from my home to facilitate speech and language goals in children. You don’t always need to spend a lot of money to buy toys. If you think outside the box, you will realize that you can achieve the same goals by using your creativity and effort to achieve the desired results.
Use of Water Play:
Who doesn’t like to play with soap and water??
I have used water while pretending to play with the children. We have washed cars, fruits, vegetables, baby dolls, and animals. I have also used water while pretend cooking with the kids mixing, pouring, measuring and filling water in containers. Water balloons and water sprinklers were also utilized while working with toddlers. Children have also participated in washing dishes with their parents at the sink using soap and water.
Goals:
- Providing sensory/tactile feedback.
- Improving play skills, imagination and creativity in kids.
- Following 1-step, 2-step, multi-step directions.
- Asking and answering -Wh (what, where, who, why) questions.
- Vocabulary building and labeling nouns.
- Labeling action verbs, pronouns, prepositions, and adjectives.
- Labeling color, shape and size of the items while using pretend toys with water.
- Problem-solving strategies.
- Sequencing and retelling steps while engaging in a car wash activity
- Describing items with reference to its attributes/functions.
- Formulating grammatically correct sequential sentence structures using appropriate parts of speech, grammatical markers, and punctuation markers.
- Writing sequential steps using descriptive language for older age groups, for example; making a lemonade.
- Pragmatic language goals like attending, requesting items, taking turns, asking questions to clarify, and engaging and listening to the speaker.
- Working on articulation goals while using items from a category with the particular sound you are working on during the session.
Use of Stickers, Puppets, and Wind-up toys:
One can use stickers, wind-up toys, and puppets during play. The kids enjoy the anticipation which comes from the wind-up toys and the puppets during the play.
Goals:
- Pragmatic language goals like attending, requesting items, taking turns, asking questions to clarify, and engaging and listening to the speaker and joint attention.
- Acts as a reinforcer with younger kids.
- Working on articulation goals while playing with the wind up toys and puppets.
- Stickers can be used to name body parts on self and others, used as a reinforcer while practicing production of speech sounds at various levels.
- Puppets and wind up toys can be used for production of animal sounds, labeling the toys, describing them, and using them in pretend play.
- Facilitates repetition of a task or an activity.
- Following 1-2 step directions.
- Expanding the length of utterances from single word production to 2-3 word utterances.
- Answering simple -Wh ( what, where) and how questions.
