During a speech-language therapy session, we use many play-based activities that are also familiar in the home environment. With some clever – or maybe even obvious – enhancements to these activities, you can be using the same strategies at home to support your child in their speech, language, and overall communication development. In this Activity Feature series, we bring you tips and tricks on turning the activities you already know and love into fantastic (and fun!) learning opportunities.
Activity: Blocks
With blocks and other building toys, such as Legos and magnet tiles, you can work on many communication skills across a wide range of ages and stages of development. While younger children may enjoy stacking and crashing blocks, others may like to arrange blocks by shape or color. As they age, children may begin to build more complex structures. You can engage in this type of activity with your child in a meaningful and developmentally appropriate way by mimicking their play with the item, modeling new or different ways to play, working together to build a shared structure, or providing instructional support to help them accomplish their goal.
Skills Addressed
Playing with blocks and other building toys is often recognized as a way to develop fine motor skills – by picking up and manipulating objects – as well as spatial awareness. However, this type of play can just as easily be used to support communication development.
Phonological awareness: Use blocks as manipulatives to represent the sounds or syllables in a word. Remove or add sounds to your “words”, tap each block as you sound out the word, or work on isolating sounds/syllables and then blending them back together. Accumulate more blocks for each new word, and build something as you go to bring an element of play to the exercise.
Expressive Language: As with any toy that consists of multiple pieces, blocks can be used to create repeated opportunities for requesting. Keep them in a closed box and present only a few at a time. As your child indicates a desire for more, encourage them to use their words or longer phrases to make this request. For older children, you might have them exercise their descriptive language skills by giving you instructions for how to build something.
Receptive Language: Practice following directions with children of any age using building toys! This can be as simple as asking them to retrieve a specific block (e.g., by color, shape, or size), or for older children could be more complex verbal instructions for building a structure or practice with location words (e.g., on, under, behind).
While these are only a few examples, with practice you can use blocks to address many other skills. To discover more ways to support your child’s growth using blocks and other activities – for the skills listed above as well as articulation, pragmatics, voice, resonance, fluency, AAC, and feeding – reach out to our pediatric speech-language therapy clinic located in Tukwila by calling (206) 458-5360.