School will be out soon and you might be worried that your child may not get the speech help that’s needed over the break. Good news is there are plenty of fun and creative ways to continue speech work with your child over the summer!
- The Alphabet Game: If you find you and your child are on the go for most of the summer this is a great activity for the car. Pick a speech sound that your child has been working on and together name as many words as you can that start with that sound. Involve everyone in the car! For example, if your child is working on /s/ you would all take turns saying words like “sun”, “sand”, and “super”. For older children you can make it more challenging and add a category for example “Beach words that begin with /s/” or name things you may see as you are driving with their target sound.
- Beach Hunt: Days that are spent playing in the sand can be made into a hunt for different objects or picture cards that involve different speech sounds that your child has been working on throughout the past school year. First, bury the cards into the sand. Next, ask your child to dig/search to find the objects/cards. Have them collect all the objects/cards and put them into a sand pale/bucket. After, review all the items by modelling the words and asking your child to repeat the objects/pictures name.
- Reading: For leisure time reading books is a great way to work on speech. You can have many different style books to read with your child. Such as narrative, interactive (iPad stories), or picture stories. You can either pick books that involve a particular speech sound, read to them, or have them create their own narrative to the picture books. Your child can also make their own books by cutting out pictures with their target sound and gluing them to construction paper. Then your child can read their book to you!
- Scavenger Hunt: This is a great rainy day activity to work on specific speech sounds and vocabulary. Have pictures or words hidden around a room, and have your child collect them all with clues as to where to find them. After, have them either review by reading the words to you or read them and ask them to repeat the words back to you. The words and pictures should be speech sounds or vocabulary words that your child has been working on during the previous school year.
- Private Speech Therapy: Of course for additional help for your child’s speech needs you can contact a private Speech Therapy office to ensure no regression from the summer off. In a private Speech Therapy office a certified Speech Language Pathologist can continue the work that your child has done throughout the school year to continue improvement of their speech and language skills.