Brought to you by Oasis Pediatric Home Healthcare Speech Therapist, Megan.

It can be tough on both parents and children with special needs to be stuck inside.

Here are some helpful ideas to help make speech therapy at home more fun.

MIX IT UP!

One common toy we usually see in families’ homes are chunky puzzles. Here are some different ways to use your puzzles to target speech and language skills while keeping your child engaged and learning at home.

1. Hide puzzle pieces around the room and create a “puzzle hunt”. See if they can find all of the pieces to complete their puzzle. This is a great task to practice using prepositional phrases (under, on, next to), as well as following directions. 

2. When I am in the home doing in person sessions, I create tunnels using the couch and ottoman or coffee table. I place pillows or blankets connecting the couch to the ottoman/table to create a covered “tunnel”. Then I put all the pieces of the puzzle on one end of the tunnel and the board will stay with me at the other opening. Have the child crawl through and get a piece of the puzzle to bring back to you. You can start with a simple game for early language learners by just labeling the pieces they bring back. To increase difficulty, give your child an instruction when retrieving a piece (can you get the animal that says “moo”? Can you find something red?).

3. Create an obstacle course while completing a puzzle. For this task, I place an empty puzzle board at one end of the room and use a trail of pillows or blankets that the child can hop across to go retrieve a puzzle piece from the opposite end of the room. One way to add a level of difficulty is to use two puzzles for sorting. Puzzle sorting is one more way to target great language concepts like categories (vehicle, animal, food) and functions of objects (what do we do with it? Eat it, ride it, wear it…). 

GO OUTSIDE

Families have been spending increased amounts of time inside and online. One activity that is easy and beneficial is to take a break and go outside. Whether you are on a front porch, apartment balcony, or walking in your neighborhood there are opportunities to practice speech and language waiting outside!

1. One of my favorite speech and language activities is going on a scavenger hunt. Grab a free Fall Scavenger Hunt worksheet here! There are two levels of difficulty offered in this activity. The easiest level has pictures of items to find and match and the more difficult one asks the child to think of and find items based on an adjective (find something furry). 

2. For kiddos who are working on speech sounds, see if they can find things that start with their sound. For example, if a child is working on the /s/ sound, point out all the things you can find that start with that sound (sun, sidewalk, sign).  

SOCIAL STORIES

We have been using lots of different social stories in therapy with my families. A social story helps explain a social scenario in a simple way as well as teaches appropriate tools and responses a child can use in those situations. Click HERE for a free social story for wearing a mask I made for my therapy kids who were going back to school and required to wear a mask. Another great resource is this awesome social story that Sesame Street created to explain the 2020 school year. Here's the link to Sesame Street social story:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l7Sy2gTBIE

This article was written by Oasis Pediatric Speech and Language Pathologist, Megan.