Hi there! It’s great to have you back at HeadStart For Life’s Blog, Beyond Therapy!

In our previous blog post, we introduced a couple of activities that you can have fun together with your child, as well as to get him to willingly practise his speech sounds. You can access part one of this series over here: Fun Ways to Work with Your Child’s Speech – Part I

Have you tried out some of the ideas with your little ones? If you have, do leave a reply below to let us know how it went! It’d be a pleasure to hear from you!

Today, we are back with more ideas on how you can keep the fun and your child’s interest in practising the speech sounds. We hope that these ideas will be helpful to you. Do let us know if you have any other ideas that you’d like to share with us too!

Alright, let’s get going!

1. Sensory Bin

All children love sensory play. The tactile input that a child gets from digging through the sensory bin will definitely keep him coming back for more.

Preparation of the materials is simple and easy. You will need a large container to contain your sensory materials, which can be rice, beans, peas or kinetic sand. You can even use soil, mud or real sand. Hide chips (or coins) in the sensory bin and have your child dig all of them out with his hands or a shovel.

To make the activity more challenging and the sensory bin more visually stimulating, you can even hide distractors, such as colourful marbles or tiny pebbles, in the sensory bin.

Sound level:

• For every chip found, your child will have to say the target sound accurately before he can collect it. You can even set a timer. The goal is to collect all the chips before the time runs out!
• Alternatively, you can have a competition with your child to see who can find and collect the most number of chips. In this way, you will also have to say the target sound along with your child, hence he will not feel that he is the only one who has to practise his speech sounds. You might get a more cooperative and confident child! In addition, your child will receive a significant amount of auditory bombardment on the accurate speech sound production by you throughout the activity.

Word level:

• Instead of chips, you can hide pictures of words containing the target sound in the sensory bin. Your child will have to name the picture that he digs out.

Note: This activity is recommended for children above 3 years old and should always be supervised by an adult because of small parts.

2. Feed The “Hungry” Animal

Decide on what the “hungry” animal shall be. The food that this animal likes to eat will be used as tokens to reward your child. Your child will have to feed the “hungry” animal using the tokens. Use your child’s favourite animal so that he will be motivated and excited to feed the animal!

You can print out the animal and the food that it eats on paper then laminate them. Alternatively, you can also craft them using cardboard.

Sound level:

• Before your child can feed each token to the “hungry” animal, he has to say the target sound accurately. You can control the materials such that your child gets only one token at a time.

Word level:

• Print out pictures of words containing the target sound, then attach the pictures to the tokens. Your child will have to name the picture on each token before he can get the token to feed the animal.

 

 

3. Ball Toss

This is an activity that you can try with children who love to move around.

Take turns to throw a ball into the cups or buckets. The further away the cup or bucket is from the players, the greater the score of successfully tossing a ball into that cup or bucket. The player who accumulates the highest amount of points at the end wins the game.

Sound level:

• You can use cotton wool balls to represent snowballs. Tape the base of the cup to the surface on which it is placed so that it does not topple over easily. Before each player can throw the snowball into the snowman cups, he will have to say the target sound accurately.

Word level:

• Print out pictures of words containing the target sound. On each player’s turn, he has to randomly select a picture and name it. After he has accurately named the picture, he can crumple up the picture into a paper ball and toss it into the buckets.

 

You can also tweak the activities that we have shared in both parts of this series to suit your child’s needs, interests and level of play. Enjoy practicing the speech sounds together with your child using these ideas from HeadStart For Life’s blog post today! See you back here soon!