Therapy Tip of the Week 8.3.12

Here’s this week’s Therapy Tip of the Week:

Farm Animal Ideas

This week’s segment provides ideas for using farm animals during play with toddlers to target language.

Animals are universally appealing to young children, even for kids who live in metropolitan areas!

Use this natural interest to keep a child engaged while teaching new words. Focus on teaching words beyond the nouns/names for animals and animal sounds. Introduce verbs/action words and prepositions/location words and even higher level language concepts like size words, plurals, and following two-step directions.

Farm play is also great for helping a child learn to use two objects together in play which is a critical cognitive skill a child must master.

For more ideas about using farm animals in play with toddlers with expressive and receptive language delays, check out these resources from teachmetotalk.com:

Building Verbal Imitation in Toddlers

Teach Me To Listen and Obey 2

For a more structured way to teach a child to understand and use more words, I highly recommend Teach Me To Talk: The Therapy Manual. While this book was written for therapists, many moms who are committed to providing the bulk of their child’s therapy at home have told me that this is their favorite resource for knowing what to work on and how to do it!