(Newswire.net — July 31, 2020) — The rate of your child’s cognitive development depends on how well they’re able to communicate. The faster their language develops, the better they’re able to learn at a young age. As such, a child who speaks and understands well is highly likely to be a fast learner and reader.
What if your child’s speech and language isn’t quite at the level you expect it to be at a certain age? What if they have trouble understanding your words or expressing verbally at an age when they’re already supposed to have made considerable headway in both departments?
While you should definitely schedule a meeting with a speech-language pathologist as soon as possible to address this, in the meantime, you can engage your child in several fun activities that can enrich their speech and language. In that way, you’d also be doing your part to manage whatever your little one could be going through developmentally.
Language Development Activities for Toddlers
It’s important fortoddlers to have healthy activities or exercises to incorporate their speech therapy after. Some of the highly recommended ones are:
1. Reading
One of the best ways to introduce your little ones to words is reading to them daily, preferably before they head to bed. Read them picture books and ask them questions related to the story.
As you go along, you may also want to point to images on a page and have your child identify them. In this way, you can help enrich your youngster’s vocabulary and teach them how to respond appropriately to questions.
2. Matching Letters and Objects
Using alphabet flashcards or cardboard drawn with the letters of the alphabet and a set of pictures of objects, you can play the alphabet matching game with your little one. Start by handing over the pictures to your child and asking them to tell you what they are. Then, proceed to ask them to match the image to its starting letter.
Through this activity, your child will use phonetics to match the objects and the letters, helping them improve their spelling skills.
3. Singing
Kids love it when you do fun things with them. Singing is one such activity that can help your little ones enjoy and learn at the same time.
By singing lyrics of songs and rhymes, your toddler will enrich the language skills that they look forward to. It is also the perfect activity for you to introduce nouns and verbs unfamiliar to your little one so that he or she will have a way of learning and remembering them.
4. Naming-That-Object Game
As the name of the game suggests, you just have to ask your child to identify an object after pointing to it. You can help them out as they attempt to pronounce new words for them to say them correctly eventually.
This probably ranks as one of the easiest activities that help children build and improve their vocabulary. On top of that, it can also be played anywhere.
5. The Telephone Game
It’s no secret that most toddlers are curious about the telephone. From the ringing sounds it makes to why mommy and daddy keep “talking” to it, there’s probably quite a few things stirring up your toddler’s interest in the device.
Your little ones will surely be happy to know that they can use the telephone for learning. Not the actual telephone, per se, though, but a toy telephone.
Get yourself a pair of toy telephones and pretend you’re dialing a number. Then, encourage your little one to pick up the toy telephone and answer with a “hello”. Doing this regularly should help improve your child’s speaking skills and develop proper phone etiquette.
6. Speaking in Complete Sentences
Even when you know your little one can’t understand some of your words, speak to them as if they could. You must ask your toddler questions in complete sentences because this encourages them to respond in the same manner.
Using this appropriate manner of speaking to your child, you can give them an excellent foundation for constructing strong, coherent sentences. In this way, in the future, they would be able to articulate their thoughts very well.
7. Connecting the Dots
Create an illustration of alphabet letters using dotted lines. Then, have your little one connect the dots comprising each letter and ask him or her to identify it.
This practice will help your child develop their motor skills, as well as improve their writing. You can hand your little one colored pencils and crayons to make the activity more fun and exciting.
Language-Enhancing Activities
The activities mentioned above and plenty of other practices are just some of the vital information you’ll find in the guidelines on speech and language development.
While these methods can help address speech and language problems in children, they shouldn’t be the sole solution you resort to for delays that stem from physical and cognitive challenges. In any instance that indicates language and speech issues in youngsters, always make it a point to seek guidance from a speech-language pathologist first.