Sometimes it is hard to find time to do homework while working around other commitments with your kids.
In the car is a perfect time for busy families. We spend a lot of time in the car and it is a great opportunity to use that time to work on their speech and language while encouraging positive and motivating interactions.
Below are some ideas to try in the car to maximise your time
I-Spy
I-Spy is often a favourite road trip game to play in the car. It is also a fantastic game that helps promote speech and language skills as it can be adapted to suit both young and older children. It is a great game for developing vocabulary, describing skills, categorisation, sentence structure, understanding and use of prepositions and many more.
For younger children, labelling items outside the car is a great way to build vocabulary and identifying features of the item such as colour, shape and size.
For older children, describing items outside the car is a great way to build sentence structure, use of appropriate grammar and describing skills.
Creative Stories
Another favourite is creating stories. It is fantastic for turn-taking skills, creative and flexible thinking, sentence structure, use of grammar and sequencing events. It can be adapted for younger and older children and it a great way to engage and motivate children in speech and language-based activities.
Playing an adapted game of Chinese Whispers is a great way to get everyone involved without too much pressure to create a whole story. Someone can start the story with a sentence, then the next person can add another sentence onto that one until you end up creating an imaginative story.
Younger children may need some prompts and cues. It can also be fun to audio record the story so you can go back and listen to it later for a laugh and to provide feedback on your child’s speech and language use.
Singing
Singing is beneficial in so many ways. It is a great way of encouraging changes in tone of voice, engagement, language use and articulation of speech sounds. Alternating the tones in voice helps adults and children remember certain words and their meanings.
For younger children, singing nursery rhymes and ABC’s is a great way for developing and remembering knowledge of words and concepts.
For older children, singing a family favourite song is great for encouraging participation, sentence structure, grammar and vocabulary development.
What types of exercises do Harrison Speech Path provide for at home?
The therapists at Harrison Speech Pathology will give specific exercises for your child based on their needs. Exercises will always be individualised for engagement and motivation. Exercises are kept simple and fun for you and your child to ensure the exercises are not seen as an effort to complete.
For example, if your child is having difficulty with sentence structure and describing skills, playing games such as charades (using pictures of familiar items/objects) is a fun and engaging way to encourage the development of these skills and can be fun for the whole family.
