At Allcare Therapy Services, our Speech Language Pathologists love working with children to help them master the speech sounds and vocabulary they need to confidently handle any social or academic situation. However, we’re not with them all the time, and it’s important that parents continue therapy at home.
With the summer weather here in full swing, what better way to have fun outside than to incorporate speech therapy into playtime?
Here are just a few ideas to get your kids the outdoors and speech therapy time they need.
Play With Water
Whether it’s from the garden hose, in your pool, or the sprinklers, you can cool off and work on your child’s speech skills at the same time using water! You can work on concepts like wet vs. dry, expand their vocabulary using words like splash, jump, spray, or puddle, or you can improve articulation! Words like water (/w/, /t/, /r/), pool (/p/, /l/), and bath (/b/, “th”) can all help children with articulation problems work on their sounds!
Use Sand At The Beach
Every child’s favorite thing to do at the beach can double as a speech activity! Not only is it a great way to work on their social skills (taking turns, asking to use a shovel, helping to work towards one objective), but concepts like digging vs. burying and building vs. knocking down can be explored.
Work on your child’s articulation and vocabulary with words like dig (/d/, /g/), castle (/c/), sand (/s/, /d/), and build (/b/, /d/). You can even help them to identify and associate colors by giving them directions to follow such as “fill up the green bucket” or “hand me the yellow shovel.”
Sidewalk Chalk
What better way to work on speech than drawing the words out? Kids love playing with sidewalk chalk, and you can work with different colors and ask your kids (if they’re old enough) to spell out words on the sidewalk.
Try making a game of hopscotch with different words or pictures that represent words in each box that targets an articulation goal, ask your child to say it, and once they get it right, they can hop into the next box. Make sure to have a fun reward for them once they get to the end!
The possibilities for speech and articulation activities are endless in the summer!