Speech and Language Development Through Play
“Opportunities? They are all around us…there is power lying latent everywhere waiting for the observant eye to discover it." Orison Swett Marden
As this quotes states, there are opportunities all around us to develop a child’s communication abilities and PLAY is one such opportunity that we as parents should make the most of!
Until the age of 7 years children learn primarily through play. Every time you play with your child you have the opportunity to develop his/her speech and language development. Talking about the game, matching what you say to what you are doing and making sound-effects while playing all help a lot in improving a child’s communication skills. There are many ways in which you can play with children.
Exploratory play
Many household objects and toys are made of a wide range of materials. Exploring them helps children to learn about the properties and qualities of things- shapes, sounds, colours and texures. This provides experiences on which later language learning is based. Simple sand play and water play result in good concept development.
Let’s say your child is walking towards the new table and chair that you have purchased for him. You can let him touch it, pull it and sit on it while you talk about it. ‘ This is hard… Its made of plastic… red chair and red table… This is Ben’s new table and chair” … Thus you can introduce the concept of color, shape, texture and other distinctive features about the everyday objects in his environment that he will be using from now on. In fact every day you can reiterate the same concepts in different situations. He will learn to associate the meaning with the words and gradually the concept is learnt with repeated and varied exposure.
Physical play
Running, jumping, rolling, stretching, crawling and swinging enable the child to understand movement and space. This helps children in many ways including the development of prepositions and verbs. Physical play also helps children learn to initiate, co-ordinate and sequence movements.
You can model a variety of new words every time your child prepares to get ready for his favourite physical activity, be it swimming or a ball game or a rough and tumble game with Dad! You can talk about the clothes and accessories he/she could wear. Infact, you could give your child instructions to bring them to you or you could allow him/her to make a choice then you could describe and appreciate his choice in words. When he plays you could maintain an ongoing verbal commentary highlighting special words like the verbs- describing the actions or even emotions such as happy, tired. Always provide feedback for his verbal and non-verbal behaviours. Your child needs to understand that even through play he can express himself and that words form a key vehicle for this expression.
Constructive Play
Building blocks, lego and duplo- games which involve fitting things together to make a tower, house etc help in integrating sensory and motor skills and in the development attention, memory and retrieval skills in children which are essential for speech and language development.
It would be good to set aside time daily to play one on one with your child using these constructive toys. Utilize concrete words related to what you are doing. Using simple sentences to talk about the actions, eg, Let’s put the blue big block on this red one…Now this looks like a tall red and blue tower, doesn’t it Ben? What would you like to make next? I think we need a car. Here are the wheels. Can you help me now..?” Allow the child to imitate the words and sentences you model by giving him time to think through and respond while you are talking about the activity.
Pretend play
Using objects, pictures and gestures to represent events from daily life during pretend play develops the foundation on which children build their ability to recognize and use symbols like spoken words, pictures and written words through which they can represent thoughts and ideas.
If you have a teddy or a baby doll set that’s good, otherwise you could even take a large lego block or a pen and pretend to use that as a bottle to feed the baby saying that the baby is crying and needs to be fed. Then let your child do it. Or, if the set has a toy bottle you can let your child find it, take it out of the bag and act as if she is heating and preparing the milk bottle ( just as you do for him or her) and then feed the baby.
Co-operative play
Playing well with other children indicates that your child is developing social interaction skills involving giving, taking, sharing and turn taking. In today’s society when we tend to live in high-rise buildings, children do not get the chance to find play mates to play with regularly. Create opportunities. Make it a point to take your child to the play area in your condo or in the neighborhood park play area on a regular basis. Allow your child to perhaps meet the same or even new kids and then start to make friends. This marks the beginning of good social interaction skills, which are necessary for a child’s social and emotional development, which is vital for good communication skills.
Role play
Children learn a lot by acting out their experiences – imaginative play related to being a parent, teacher, doctor, shopkeeper or even a lion, helps them to acquire skills which are central to language development. These fun activities involving dressing up and using home-made props like empty cereal boxes, paper money etc. encourage children to be more imaginative and provide them with lots of different models of behaviour. Such activities help them develop good conversational skills, sequencing skills and their organizational ability. Using puppets to enact stories can be another way to make children more expressive. Through role play not only do your child’s language skills develop but his/her confidence, creativity and non-verbal communication skills all increase dramatically too!
By engaging your child in wide range of play situations many key areas of child development essential for good communication can be enhanced.
- Attention skills and listening skills
- Eye contact / turn taking skills
- Memory skills
- Vocabulary building
- Comprehension of language
- Expressive language skills
- Speech sound production skills
- Social Skills
With so much to gain and nothing to lose, do set aside time every day to role up your sleeves, get down to the level of your child and play together. Play is the most natural and fun way to learn. Time spent playing with children is an investment in their future.
Article written by
Ms. Aparna Bhonsle & Dr Radika Vasudeva
Consultant Speech Language Therapists
ISSW
References
Working with Children’s Language by Jackie Cooke and Diana Williams
