Summer Speech, Language, Communication and Literacy Enrichment Activities
The 2020-2021 school year is wrapping up in New York and students in other states may already be free from attending school for a few months. Families often ask, “What can we do to maintain and further develop our child’s speech, language and communication skills over the summer?”. If your child has received school based speech therapy this school year, their SLP may have already shared a generic calendar or list with you containing ideas. If you had the opportunity to observe or assist in your child’s speech therapy sessions when school was remote and school based services were provided via telepractice, you can implement the strategies and techniques the SLP modeled during your everyday life. If you are currently working with an SLP, they may coach you on certain prompts that help your child accurately produce speech sounds or demonstrate strategies you can use to encourage speech, language, communication and literacy skill progress. Here are some suggestions on how to stimulate, encourage and improve speech, language, communication and literacy skills including activity ideas and examples of how speech, language, communication and literacy skills are embedded into these fun activities. Please keep in mind that these suggestions are not a replacement for speech therapy and if you have concerns about your child’s speech, language, communication and/or literacy to find a speech-language pathologist and get your child screened or evaluated.
“What can we do to maintain and further develop our child’s speech, language and communication skills over the summer?”
Preparing food and drinks
Following a recipe to make a dish, homemade ice cream or ice pops or a drink like lemonade is an opportunity to work on receptive language (what your child understands) by following multistep directions. Following multistep directions also involves using working memory and recall to remember the steps during the process of making the lemonade. You can also work on literacy by having your child read the recipe. If your child doesn’t read yet, you can read it to them, have them follow picture steps and/or watch a video of someone preparing that recipe first. You can work on expressive language (what your child says) by asking wh- questions after reading through the recipe (i.e. What do we need first? Where is the sugar?). If your child likes to be in the spotlight, pretend they are a celebrity chef or mixologist and film them as if they are hosting a cooking show or YouTube video, talking the audience through the steps of the recipe, making comments etc. This can be candid or you can add in a writing element and have them write a script before filming.
2. Lemonade stand or tag sale
I already covered the skills it takes to make lemonade in #1. If you want to add an extra element of communication to a lemonade activity, you can make a lemonade stand in post COVID-19 times. Putting together a tag sale could target categorization skills by having your child sort what is for sale and helping organize (i.e. clothing goes on one table, kitchen items go on another table etc.). You can add a literacy component by having the child create the signs for the lemonade stand or tag sale. Communication skills in this activity could include greeting customers, making small talk, answering questions about the products, telling customers their total at checkout, and telling customers to have a good day. Obviously only do this with a responsible adult supervising.
3. Reading
Reading is an enriching activity in all four seasons. In the summer, read outside in a hammock, on a blanket in the grass, at the beach, or under the stars camping with a lantern or flashlight. Pause to ask open ended or yes no questions about what is going on in the story. Ask inference questions like, “What do you think will happen next?” or, “How do you think the character feels?”.
4. Gardening
Getting your hands in the soil is a great sensory activity. You can work on following multistep directions or have the child direct others’ actions and say which plants go where. Gardening can be a language enriching activity by discussing how the plants look and comparing and contrasting how they looked yesterday with how they look next week. You can incorporate writing by having a plant journal and writing a sentence or so each day about how the plant looked or what was done to care for it.
5. Jump rope
Jumping rope gets those endorphins flowing and is also an opportunity to work on speech skills and phonological awareness skills by singing and chanting those jump rope songs like “Ms. Mary Mack”, “Cinderella” and “Teddy Bear”. Rhyming and phonological awareness are foundation skills for reading and spelling, and rhyming is a key characteristic of jump rope songs.
6. Mother May I
If you haven’t played this game, one person is the mother and they stand far away while the other players start on one line and take turns asking, “Mother may I [insert verb and number of times]?”. For example, “Mother may I jump 3 times?”, “Mother may I crab walk 5 times?”. The mother can say yes, no or provide conditions (i.e. No you can only crabwalk four times” and the player can only do what the mother says or else they are cheating. The first player to get to mother and tag them wins.This game targets expressive and receptive language by having the players ask and answer questions. It even has a built in sentence starter, “Mother may I ____?”.
7. Toothpaste/Goofy
I loved playing this game in my neighbor’s pool, some people call it toothpaste and some people call it goofy. The person who is it is on one side of the pool and the other players are on the other side. The person who is it picks a category (i.e. farm animals, colors, fruits) and then closes their ears/goes underwater and gives the players time to pick something within that category. Then “it” comes up for air and starts calling things in that category out until they call out one of the player’s item within the category (ie pig, turquoise, watermelon). Then they race eachother to the opposite end of the pool and call out “toothpaste” or “goofy” when they touch the wall. Whoever swam to the opposite wall fastest is “It” the next round. This game targets speech skills because the person who is It has to demonstrate intelligible speech. The players have to be able to quickly think of items within a certain category, which is a language skill.
8. Water table
You can model doing different verbs (i.e. pour, splash, float, sink, wash, scrub) at a water table, in the pool or the bathtub and make comments. You can put waterproof toys or objects (i.e. spoons, plastic eggs, cup) in the water and have your child find them, say what they found, answer questions like, “What do you do with the spoon?” or “Where is the fish?”. This targets expressive language skills. You can do pretend play with ocean animal toys, rubber ducks, boats, plastic dolls, mermaids or superheroes.Pretend play encourages expressive language skills, communication skills and usually speech skills since kids love to make sound effects during pretend play and make their toys talk.
9. Simon Says with a sprinkler
Play Simon Says while cooling off with directions like, “Simon Says jump over the sprinkler” or, “Simon says put your right hand in the sprinkler”. This targets receptive language skills for the players who are not Simon and targets expressive language and speech skills for Simon.
10. Literacy at the beach
Work on spelling or decoding (reading) words at the beach by using a finger or stick to write in the sand. This targets phonological skills which are foundational for reading and spelling. To spell and read, you need phoneme (speech sound) to grapheme (written letter) knowledge. It’s a lot more fun and appealing to write in the sand with your finger (a sensory activity some people may like) or using a stick than it is to use a pen and paper.
If these activities can’t tide you over between school years, there is absolutely no shame in that. Please contact a speech-language pathologist for private practice speech therapy services. Have a great summer!