Every baby may not speak at the same pace; every child is different, but there are speech therapy activities for toddlers that you can do to help your child learn to talk. Here are some examples of activities you can try:
Use simple sounds
Use simple sounds like “da” and “ma” or “ba” and “aa” or “ooh” to babies even when they are newborns. These vowels and consonants can have great responses from children. Simple therapy activities like this can help your child talk, and as they grow, they will listen and try to imitate you.
Speak slowly
Try to speak slowly while speaking face to face to your toddler and make eye contact. Also, simple words and friendly tones so they can understand you better. If your child repeats the words incorrectly, gently repeat the words in a friendly manner so they can repeat them correctly.
TV does NOT help to get children to talk.
Don’t turn the TV on as soon as you get home or have it on constantly when your toddler is in the room. Contrary to what you may think, speech therapy activities do not recommend TV. Human contact is crucial in the language development process.
Play with your child
Playing with your child is an excellent way to communicate with your child and to build motor skills, along with many other benefits. While playing, allow your toddler to tell you what to do, stay in the background, and do what your child asks you to do. It allows them to build confidence without pressurizing your child to talk. It’s a fun part of your speech therapy activities!
Tell your baby what you are doing
When you are feeding, bathing, or changing your child, keep talking to your child about what you are doing. If you are going out, talk about where you are going in simple language. You will be amazed at the number of things that a tiny brain can store and bring out!
Read books
Reading books with colorful pictures is one of the best speech therapy activities. Reading gets associated with security and love. This activity can lead your child to a life-long love of books.
Introduce colors and shapes
You can introduce colors and shapes to your child by showing colorful building blocks or other colorful items while gently pointing out the colors and shapes and saying the names as you play with her. Your child will learn to distinguish both colors and shapes naturally and simultaneously.
Use hand gestures
Use lots of hand movements like clapping, peek-a-boo, or the itsy bitsy spider movement (fingers crawling up his arm). Always wave when you leave and try to use gestures when you communicate with your child. All these hand gestures help the child associate a word with a meaning and build their vocabulary.
Singing and rhyming
Singing children’s songs and nursery rhymes with your child is also a vital speech therapy activity. They encourage speech because of the presence of rhythm and rhyming words. It brings your child closer to you; you are both having fun and learning too! We also use music therapy as one of our methods to help toddlers with their speech therapy in our Mascot Clinic at Kita Therapy.
Introduce new words step by step
Add new vocabulary by adding new words to a word that your child already knows. For example, when your child says the word ‘doll,’ you can specify the doll more by saying it is a ‘big doll’ or ‘pink doll.’ Your baby learns new words and will learn to associate words with each other.
Teach them to ask for things
When giving your child something to eat, mention the name of the food. For example, you can say, “How about an apple? We have red apples”, or “Do you want an apple or a banana?” Whether choosing between their breakfasts or their outfits, ask your children to make a decision. While they will learn about decision-making, this activity can also help your baby’s neurodevelopment.
Encourage communication
When your child says something, encourage your child to make eye contact. Correct your child only by repeating what they are speaking with the correct words, so your child learns the right way to say words.
Teach them to say “thank you” and “please” early in life.
Children learn manners from their parents, so show them that you always say please and thank you when speaking to other family members. Your child will automatically pick up these words as well. Ask your family members to cooperate as well. This activity will also help to groom your child to be a well-mannered adult in the future.
Use toys to help your child’s speech development
Nothing works better than using a toy to help your child’s speech development. If you ask any speech-language pathologist, they would recommend that the best method to train your baby’s speech and language skills is by using toys.
There are a lot of toys you can use, but not all of them are suitable. You might think that shiny and colorful Fisher-Price piano that plays out ABC music when your toddler presses the keyboard is perfect, but they are not. Electrical toys tend to limit children’s imagination as the child does not need to do anything while playing with such toys. The best type of toys to stimulate children’s speech and language development are those that let your child move around and play with it manually. So, on your next trip to Toys-R-Us, look for these main points when you buy toys for speech therapy activities for toddlers:
- High-quality toys that can take a beating.
- Toys your child loves (i.e., cars, animals, dolls, painting, etc.)
- Toys that build imagination (i.e., stacking wooden block toys)
- Toys that encourage movement activity (i.e., a ball)
- Try not to get battery-operated toys.
Wooden blocks are a perfect example as toddlers love to stack blocks. If you get colorful ones with letters on them, you can talk to your child about the colors or the letters. You can teach words like “tall,” “up,” and “on.” My friend’s daughter is just one, and she can already find the “red” block!