5 Ways to Advance Speech-Language Skills This Summer
School is out for the summer! It brings on excitement for new activities and vacations. But it also puts a pause on structured academic activities…
While some children benefit from this break, many children need opportunities to maintain skills in order to thrive in the upcoming school year. This leaves many parents wary of the summer lull. Keeping your child entertained while working on academics falls on parents’ plates for the summer months. Many parents are curious about how to do this right and asking:
How do we have a relaxing break while still working on skills that will prepare my child for the school year ahead?
As a previous certified teacher turned speech-language pathologist and mother of 2 little ones, I did a great deal of thinking about this topic. I thought about all different types of activities and picked the best ones so you don’t have to.
Here are 5 easy ways to promote your child’s speech-language development during the summer months:
1. Reading
Books are extremely important for speech and language development. A study in 2011 by Horst et al. found that repetition of storybooks is important for learning new vocabulary from books. Young children who heard the same book multiple times retained the new word better than children who were read different books containing the same word.
In addition to vocabulary building, reading helps develop and expand language skills and leads to better school performance. Reading helps enhance imagination since when we read, we create a visual picture of the characters and events.
It also improves memory because to understand a story, a child needs to remember all the details, backgrounds, associations, characters, and so on. Additionally, reading allows children to discover other parts of the world. When reading, children learn about people, places and events outside of their personal experience.
Bonus Tip: Save money and find free books at your local library. Many libraries have options where you can reserve books online and pick them up at your convenience. But, stopping in and browsing in an air-conditioned space can be a fun summer activity, too!
2. Open-ended play time
Play nurtures imagination, engages cognitive development, encourages problem-solving, and supports concentration and attention. When you think of play, you often think that only toddlers and preschoolers do it. But older children (first, second, third graders) enjoy and benefit from this type of activity, too! Play will obviously be different for all ages, but adding open-ended play time to their routine is never a bad idea!
Suggestions on open-ended play time for children of all ages:
· Play-doh with tools
· Clay kits
· Drawing
· Painting
· Legos
· Dolls/Figurines + House
Bonus Tip: Use Pinterest to find creative projects. “YouTube Kids” can also be a great resource for ideas and showcase other children engaging in these fun activities. Children love watching and learning from each other! My preschooler has enjoyed watching these YouTube videos on how to draw new things.
3. Travel to new places
My husband and I joke that going away with young kids is never a vacation. You are at the mercy of routines and bedtime and mealtime schedules, making it hard to truly relax and unwind. While traveling with young children may feel daunting, research supports that it can significantly boost development. Traveling allows children to see and understand different cultures, places, foods and landscapes. It exposes them to new experiences, helps them make connections to things they have heard about, inspires curiosity, and so much more.
Instead of going to the same places throughout the summer, consider traveling outside of your area. You don’t need to take an airplane or long car ride or spend lots of money to discover new places that you and your children have never seen before. There are so many new museums, parks, playgrounds, historical sites, hiking trails, new classes and restaurants that are probably closer to your home than you think.
Bonus Tip: Look for Facebook groups for parents in your area! Great way to post questions and get ideas on things to do in your area. I follow Tri-State Family Social Distancing Activities and have found so many unexpected kid-friendly places to visit that are not too far away from NYC!
4. Cook together
A plethora of important life skills can be taught while cooking, which include reading, math, science, following directions, vocabulary development, fine motor skills, safety, and executive functioning skills like planning, time management, task competition, etc.
For hesitant eaters, helping in the kitchen can provide valuable opportunities for them to explore foods. For example, making home-made pizza could be a great way to work on this. Kneading the dough and putting cheese on top are easy ways for the littlest ones to participate in the cooking process. Helping wash vegetables that will be used for the toppings can be a great non-eating activity. This helps a hesitant eater feel more comfortable with various textures and temperatures without the pressure of eating it. Touching and smelling new food in this context can provide a bridge to tasting it in the future.
Bonus Tip: There are tons of kid friendly recipes out there! But here are some of my favorite recipes to make with my kids:
5. Phonological Awareness
Phonological Awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken language. Phonemic awareness is a specific type of phonological awareness, which is critical for proficiency in reading and spelling. Phonemic awareness is an understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds called phonemes. A child who is phonemically aware can isolate sounds in a word, blend sounds together to make a word, segment a word into individual sounds, and demonstrate the most challenging skill of manipulating sounds (i.e., substituting, deleting and adding sounds in words).
Check out my post about phonemic awareness to learn more and see helpful examples!
Phonemic awareness is critically important skill. This is because if a student is not aware of the sounds they hear in words, s/he will struggle to be able to decode words when s/he wants to read them and encode words when s/he wants to spell them.
Phonemic awareness is different than phonics. Phonics involves the relationship between sounds and written print, whereas phonemic awareness involves sounds in spoken words. Phonemic awareness is oral and auditory.
Since you do not need printed materials for phonological awareness activities, they can be done practically anywhere. You can do it while walking, waiting, mealtime, during car rides, etc. Many children find these activities fun and engaging. Incorporating them into your daily routine can help build your child’s foundational skills for reading!
Bonus Tip: The organization Really Great Reading offers educators and parents a wealth a knowledge about reading development. Their site focuses on the Science of Reading which is a body of research compiled to help explain how children learn to read and why others develop reading difficulties.
Are you looking for something fun and educational for your child this summer?
We are offering virtual Phonological Awareness classes this Summer 2021!
Classes are developed and taught by teacher-turned speech therapist, Becky Iswara and aim to help children 3.5-5 years old with this important skill!
Our 30-minute class use evidence-based learning activities to teach letter/sound correspondence, alliteration, rhyming, syllable awareness, early phonemic awareness and much more. Classes are perfectly structured to keep your child engaged and learning this summer! Your child will leave this program with a new understanding, deeper phonological awareness, and improved early literacy skills. Handouts are emailed after each class so that caregivers can carry over the learning at home as well.
For more information and to sign up, click the button below or email us: Midtownspeechnyc@gmail.com
