Help! I’m concerned about my child’s language development and these flashcards don’t seem to be holding his attention!”
As a speech pathologist and mother, the thing that I love most about language teaching and learning is that it can happen anywhere and with pretty much any toy, game, book, or stick and dirt! Of course there is room in any toolkit for specific games and activities to teach language skills, but there is also heaps of flexibility in daily life to do just that.
As parents, we seem to be hardwired to feel guilty or worried about pretty much everything when it comes to our children. Parents are frequently on the lookout for activities and I’m sure many of us have 300+ screenshots of play ideas that we should/could/would do with our children. The fact is that we really all have the same goal, to raise happy, healthy and confident kids and we want to contribute the ‘good stuff’ to their overall development.
What we know about children is that, like anyone, they learn best when interested and having fun. Ask me about my interests and my attention sky-rockets and new learning comes much more easily! Ask me about the stock market and the same cannot be said. Children are no different. When trying to teach new words or concepts, children are much more likely to attend and listen to your models when the words that you model match what they are looking at and thinking about in a given moment. Children will think you’re an even better language teacher if your language models acknowledge and match or interpret the message they are trying to send you!
At The Play Way, we love to explore play-based approaches to make language learning more exciting and enjoyable for children and to remove some of the should/could/would from the equation for parents.
So, what exactly are ‘play-based’ language activities?
Play-based language activities integrate play and learning to facilitate language development. Through sensory and outdoor experiences, construction and building, imaginative play and storytelling, children are given a variety of words, concepts and opportunities for interactions.
What would you say if I said your child could learn language from you if you started by observing them play and listening more? Seems counterintuitive, right? This observation time gives you the opportunity to notice what your child is interested in. For example, let’s imagine you have set your child up with some playdough and all of the most amazing playdough stamps and animal cutters that you could get your Pinterest-y hands on. Much to your confusion, your child wants to roll sausages. Not just one sausage, an entire family of sausages! You reluctantly place your agenda of teaching all of the animal names to the side and start making sausages. You make long sausages, short sausages, green sausages and blue. You make Daddy sausage and Mummy sausage and baby sausages too. The sausage family ends up going to the shops to buy groceries. You talk about their BBQ-related friends and all of the salad vegetable sides. You talk about chopping sausages, eating sausages, squirting sauce and more. When all is said and done, you talk about rolling all of the sausages into a big ball…before turning into a pancake family!
Yes, but I wanted this to be a language teaching activity, you think. BUT consider the language you have modelled and possibly taught: concepts – long, short, big, colours; names – Mummy, Daddy; food vocabulary and category knowledge – meats, vegetables; action words – chopping, rolling, eating; and question forms, as undoubtedly you wondered ‘Where’ to go next and ‘What’ you might buy for your salad.
So my tip for this post is to observe your child in play and join them where they are. Who knows, you might even want to make a pancake family!
