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: Puzzles
Puzzles come in many shapes and sizes. From chunky, knob, and insert puzzles, to jigsaw puzzles of 2 to 2000 pieces, there truly is a puzzle for every age and stage of development, making it a great activity for encouraging a variety of skills. For the best motivation, choose puzzles that relate to your child’s interests (e.g., themed sound puzzles, jigsaw puzzles of their favorite animal, etc). Also, stick to puzzles that your child can do mostly on their own, but are not so easy as to become boring. If they need a little help arranging the pieces, point to the correct location, assist in rotating the pieces, and if needed, help guide their hand into the right position.
Skills Addressed
Most obviously, puzzles support the development of fine motor skills, spatial awareness, and matching. In this activity feature, we will explore how playing with puzzles can be expanded and adapted to also support speech and language development.
Receptive Language: Puzzles can be used to work on comprehension of a variety of vocabulary. You can work on nouns by instructing your child in which piece to retrieve next (e.g., get the pig!), moving on to more descriptive vocabulary as they age (e.g., get the pink animal). As the puzzles become more complex, so can your language, such as by describing features of jigsaw puzzle pieces (e.g., edge vs corner pieces, parts that stick out vs in).
Expressive Language (toddler): As with any activity that involves multiple pieces, you can use puzzles to work on requesting. Gather all the pieces and have your child request one piece at a time. Depending on their skill level, you can encourage them to use single words (e.g., pig), phrases (e.g., pig please), or complete sentences (e.g., I want the pig). Or you may work on making choices, by presenting two options and encouraging them to verbalize which piece they want next (e.g., do you want the pig or the horse?).
Expressive Language (school age): Another way to address expressive language with older children is to ask them questions about the picture formed by the puzzle. What is this? A pig. Where is the pig? In the barn. What color is the pig? Pink. What is the pig doing? Sleeping. Who is climbing the ladder? The farmer. Are just a few examples of exercising your child’s ability to answer questions.
While these are only a few examples, with practice you can use puzzles to address many other skills. To discover more ways to support your child’s growth using puzzles 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.