Everyday Speech and Language Skills: Road Trips (part 1)
Everyday Speech and Language Skills: Road Trips (part 1)
It is that time of year again, where we are going to visit our families for Thanksgiving and we can spend a lot of time in the car. Why not practice some of your speech and language skills? This month we are going to focus on language building skills and next month we will focus more on speech skills
- I Spy
Who remembers playing “I Spy” in the car with their siblings, on the way to grandma’s house? I know I do! Here is a way to make it more focused on speech and language skills
Young Children: Our little friends you want to just name the things you see while driving. You can point or say your child’s name to gain his/her attention and say and label something outside of your car, but you can also name things inside the car (i.e. “Look! Daddy!” or “Look! Drink!” or “Look! House!”). If your child labels something he/she sees, expand the utterance by adding a descriptor. For example, if your child says “tree”, you could say “big tree” or “climb tree”.
Older Children: Once your child has moved beyond the labeling stage, start describing things and see if your child can guess. For example, you can say “I spy something tall and brown with green leaves”. You can add more difficult descriptions as your child learns to play this game. This can be a great way to practice adjectives.
- Talk About Your Day
Ask your child about his day and see if he can tell you anything he did that day. I would recommend starting with a direction, like “Tell me what you did today.” Hopefully, he gives us a quick answer about something he did that day, but be ready for one word answers if this task is difficult. Then start asking for more information like, “What did you eat?” or “What did you play with outside?”. Avoid asking yes/no question, if you are wanting more information about his day. With our friends that have difficulty with this skill, yes/no questions are a good way to start, but you will want to try a few open-ended questions. Another way to help work on this skill is knowing what your child did that day and you talking about it. This helps prompt him to remember what had happened that day. If he is not interested in talking about his day, try talking about yours. Give a sequence of your day (i.e. “First I too a shower, then I got you out of bed and ready for the day. Next I …”)
- Making Up A Story
Make up a story while you are driving. This can be a real or make-believe story. You can start your story with “Once upon a time…” and add enough details to your sentence that your child can get some ideas. Next, ask your child to add a sentence to the story. Keep going back and forth until your story is over. (i.e. “Once upon a time the was a boy, with an airplane and a special book… The End”)
Try these things in the car and let us know how it goes! Next month we will talk about practicing speech skills in the car.
These ideas as well as other were taken from: https://www.speechandlanguagekids.com/car-rides/
