Play is the foundation of learning for young children.
Kids use play to learn about the world around them and practice new skills. When play is the basis of learning, children acquire new skills and information significantly faster than if they are simply told about it. By incorporating learning into play, you can help your child’s skills grow exponentially faster, and ensure you both are having fun while doing so.
How do you incorporate speech and language therapy into play, you ask?
For starters, play should always follow the child’s lead and incorporate their interests as much as possible. If a child is interested in dolls and dress up, make available a variety of activities in which clothes are the focus. If your child enjoys cars, have objects with wheels or objects that can roll. Even if these toys are not available, by using your imagination a clean tissue can easily become a skirt or veil, a book can become a ramp, a block can become a cell phone. It all comes down to how we interact with an object to help a child unlock their imagination.
When following their lead, we want to model our targets over and over.
- For example, if your child is struggling to use descriptive words, you might say things like, “Oh I am going to get the shiny purple dress! Feel how soft it is. I love how flowy it looks!”
- If they are having a hard time asking questions you might pretend to answer a toy cell phone and say “Hello? Who is this? Oh hi Elmo! What time are you coming over? Can you bring cake? Where are you? Is Big Bird coming too? See you soon!”
- If working on prepositions and directions while playing with a farm set, it might sound like, “I’m parking the tractor inside the garage. Uh oh, a cow is on top of the garage! That’s so silly, get down cow! You go in the barn, not on the garage!”
Our goal is to give the child opportunities to hear our targets over and over while giving them chances to incorporate the language into their own play. We can invite them into the silliness of our play while keeping performance based pressure low. This is done by modeling language rather than asking questions. When we start to ask direct questions such as “What does the dress look like? What can you say to Elmo? Where is the cow?” it puts pressure on the child to perform. We want to make sure these play based learning opportunities are just that, opportunities for learning.