At-Home Speech Therapy Exercises To Do With Your Kids

Your kids are probably at home a lot these days.

We know all too well the challenges of making sure that your kids are getting the education they need when they can’t be in school.

We also know that it can be difficult to keep them entertained while they’re stuck at home.

There’s a lot you have to do to keep kids’ attention, but what if you could help them improve their language skills as they play?

Here at District Speech, we’ve devised some fun speech therapy for kids that you can do with your children at home.

If you’d like to know more about speech therapy for kids, we also offer
– speech teletherapy so that we can help guide you through speech therapy exercises remotely.

In the meantime, check out these ways to turn playtime into speech therapy exercises, and have just as much fun as before.

1. Reuse Your Plastic Easter Eggs

Easter might seem like it was months and months ago, but there’s still more you can get out of it.

If you still have small plastic Easter eggs at home, you can use them to develop your kids’ verbal routines.

You can help them associate phrases to meaning, with dialogue like “shake, shake, shake… open” as you shake the egg and open it.

You can also try “knock, knock, knock… open” and get your children to try knocking on the egg.

Encourage your kids to ask questions about where things are when they are hidden in the egg. This is a great chance to practice prepositions.

Eggs are also a great way to teach your kids to recognize when to say “hello” and “goodbye.” Try putting toys in and out of the eggs while saying “hello” and “goodbye.”

2. Practice Your Verbs With Play Doh

Play Doh can keep your kids busy for hours on end as they can use it to make fun sculptures and new shapes.

It can also double as a learning tool for speech therapy.

Get your kids to make things with Play Doh, and then ask them to explain how they did it in sequence, as though they are teaching you.

Sculptures aren’t the only thing you can build with Play Doh—you can also use it to build your children’s vocabulary.

Take the chance to introduce them to verbs relating to fabrication, such as close, cut, push, open, roll, smash, squeeze and take out.

3. Play With Toy Cars

When your kids play with toy cars, they can learn how to follow directions—both spatially and in terms of instructions.

If your kids have a track, even better.

You can build a race track or road together by telling them which pieces to add, and when.

If you don’t have a race track, you can use household objects to come up with a route.

It might go around a chair leg and under a table, for example.

4. Play The Board Game “Guess Who?”

“Guess Who?” is a popular children’s game

It’s all about describing the appearance of people.

When playing the game, kids can get used to identifying different facial features and describing people from a wide range of backgrounds.

Structured games like this also provide the opportunity for children to understand the importance of rules and turn-taking, as well as their language skills.

5. Play With Blocks

Using building blocks can support symbolic play, which is the ability to understand that one object represents another.

For example, your kids might stack bricks and say that it’s a mountain, or stack two bricks and say it represents a house.

Encourage your children to be imaginative and to build fantasy worlds, or scenes where there are a lot of things to see.

You can add to the fun by including some of their regular toys in with their blocks.

They’ll be building houses for the teddy bears to live in no time.

Book An Appointment With District Speech

Speech is an important stage of development and we don’t want any child to miss out when they’re at home.

These exercises are only some of the ways that you can support your kids’ speech and language development from home.

If you’d like to make the most out of your playtime opportunities with your children and you would like help keeping them educated and entertained, book an appointment with District Speech.

Our speech therapists are experienced in working with children and building speech capabilities.

During your first appointment, you and your speech therapist will chat about what you’d like your kids to work on most, and the specific challenges you’re facing.

From there, we’ll come up with ideas that work for you and your family to keep your kids on track with their speech and language abilities.