How To Support Communication Development At Home
How do I support my child’s speech, language, and literacy development at home? This is a question I get asked a lot, and is the reason I started this blog and the Read, Talk, Play Book Club. There are 3 things you can do with your child every day to support their communication skills and development. Read, talk, and play with your child as often as you can, every day if possible. These 3 things will make a huge difference in their development of language, literacy, and writing skills. If you are seeing a speech therapist for speech sound delays, these 3 things will also support with faster progress and less burnout of sound practice for your child.
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1. Read
Read aloud with your kids! Read picture books, read story books, use audiobooks, and make it fun! Let kids pick books they enjoy reading, and pick books you enjoy reading too. The benefits of reading aloud with your kids are numerous. Reading aloud provides a reliably accurate and relatively sophisticated exposure to language, and supports kids in learning more complex language than they would just reading books they are able to read by themselves. It can encourage improved language and writing skills, it can boost creativity and imagination, and even critical thinking skills. It also means you (or an audiobook narrator) are providing even more models and repetitions of their target speech sounds.
For more information on this, you can check out books like the Read Aloud Family by Sarah MacKenzie, Give Your Child The World by Jamie C. Martin, and Raising Kids Who Read by Daniel Willingham. These are just a few of many available books and resources on the benefits of reading aloud, and we hope you’ll explore them and see for yourself why this is such an important routine to develop with your kids!
Looking for more inspiration on what to read next? Check out our booklists, and the Read, Talk, Play Book Club!
2. Talk
Organic, natural, and thoughtful conversations with your kids again provide a source of effective models and repetitions of the speech and language concepts they are trying to internalize. This is not the same as drill practice or telling your child to “say X”. Yes, it is great to build in repetitions and time for practice of specific speech sounds at home, but we want to go beyond that and we don’t want to make kids hate the process.
My top 2 tips for this are focus on family dinners, and embed conversations in engaging activities.
If you haven’t already explored The Family Dinner Project, I encourage you to check out their resources! They have ideas for conversation starters, recipes, activities and more. One of my favorite blog posts is their review of how the family dinner supports literacy skills in kids.
For more activities outside of the family dinner, check out our ideas on the blog and YouTube. One of my favorite types of conversational activities is an after dinner nature walk! Check out our nature walk for Max the Brave by Ed Vere here.
3. Play
Play as often as you can, and however works for your family. Two of my favorite ways to support play and embedding speech and language into play are through recipes and art.
There are so many great resources for fun art activities you can do with kids at home. Our Read, Talk, Play Book Club Guides often include an art project created by us or another creator we love. Art For Kids Hub on YouTube is one of my favorites for simple drawing projects you can do with your kids.
There are also a lot of resources for kids friendly recipes. To start, check out our recipes! Most of them are paired with a book and include target speech sounds. We also plan to have videos available for each recipe available on our YouTube channel eventually, so stay tuned for that!
As you can see, there are so many great ways you can support your child’s communication skills at home. You can embed speech, language and literacy practice into your daily routine and you can make it fun for both of you! Don’t feel like you have to do everything on this list. For this week, pick one thing, try it out and see what you think. I guarantee practice embedded in reading, talking, and playing will be much more well-received by your kids than the standard drill and repeat worksheets they usually get for speech homework. :)
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