--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TOY: BALL
A toy ball is very versatile. Kids are familiar with it so there's minimal chances your child wouldn't want to play with you simply because they don't know how to have fun with a toy and play it properly yet.You can play simple passing games with it, or turn it up a notch and have daddy teach your children actual basketball. They'll learn new terms to widen their vocabulary, get regular exercise, and not to mention learn to play with others! Here are some examples of how you can play ball with your child:
THE ACTIVITY: Taking turns!
Parent: "Look, I have a ball. Do you want to play with the ball?"Child: *Reaches for the ball*
Parent: "Okay, here you go. It's your turn to play with it. It's your turn. Okay, now it's my turn."
THE ACTIVITY: Tell me what you want!
Parent: " Oh look at my ball! It's so fun to play with it! I'll try shooting it!"
Child: *Reaches for ball*
Parent: "What do you want?"
Child: "Ball!"
Parent: "Okay, you say 'give me ball'"
Child: "Give me ball"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE ACTIVITY: Let's party!
Set up a "cooking area" for the cooking. You can even help your child plan a "menu" for the party (a great way to introduce more terms related to food which your child might not be familiar with) and teach her how to cook. For example, when cooking pasta, you cut up the ingredients first (there are some velcro toy food which you can actually cut apart), then boil the pasta, and finally put on the sauce before serving. Arrange stuffed toys, dolls, or, if your child is male, even his favorite action figures as "guests" around the table. Setting up the table with toy utensils can be great practice for getting your child to help in actual table setting for real family meals. Do you want to go more complicated? Draw up invitations (exercise those cutting and pasting skills, and even writing and drawing!) or ask each "guest" for their own "order" which you can help your child memorize or write down while pretending the party's at a restaurant.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TOY: MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
Toys that make sounds are great for catching kids' attentions! I also recommend it for children who don't yet know how to play with toys properly and tend to just shake or bang them. Having an immediate response to something they do (child pushes button and a sound comes out), helps them realize they have to keep doing the appropriate action (pushing button) to get the reaction they like (the sound). This will develop into something as obvious as appropriate use of objects to something less obvious such as speaking (the appropriate action) in order to get his favorite toy (the reaction).
THE ACTIVITY: Music time!
Make play time musical. You can say, "Do you hear that? What's that sound? It's a xylophone! I'll show you how to play with it. Look. You hold it like this and do this. Do you want to try it? Okay, here you go."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TOY: FARM HOUSE
I usually use a farm house and animals to target two different specific goals. One is for producing Early Learning to Listen (ELTL) sounds for those children just starting to talk. ELTL sounds include the sounds that animals make: moo, aw aw (that's the Filipino onomatopoeia for dogs), ssss, baa, oink, etc. They are usually just a few vowels and some easy consonants to produce, so I use them to jumpstart speaking and to help kids realize that sounds (and therefore words) are connected to objects. The other goal is for older children: detailed imaginative play. The farm house can also be used to target spatial and even temporal concepts.
THE ACTIVITY: Animal time!
Parent: This is a sheep. It says baaa. Baa. Baa. What sound does the sheep make?
Child: Baa!
Parent: Very good! The sheep says baa.
THE ACTIVITY: Guess what I am!
You can put an animal inside the barn and close the doors, or even just cover it up with your hands and have your child guess what's inside. Describe the animal to your child and have him guess it, and then take turns guessing. It targets your child's understanding of all the things he hears about the animal in order to guess it, and switching roles helps target his expression and organization of ideas.
Parent: Let's play a game. I will tell you about an animal and then you will guess what it is, okay? First, I will tell you the number of feet it has, and then I will tell you its color.
Child: Okay!
Parent: This animal has four feet. It is color pink. What is it?
Child: I don't know.
Parent: That's okay. This time I'll also tell you what sound it makes. Here goes: it has four feet, it is color pink, and it says oink oink.
Child: It's a pig!
Parent: That's right! Okay, now it's my turn to guess.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, now, don't skip this only because your child is male. There are wooden doll houses that are gender-neutral enough, and playing with houses has so many benefits! Aside from familiarity of the furniture and the house, as well as the opportunities for developing your child's imagination, doll houses are also my go-to toy for teaching rooms of the house and answering "where" questions. I even use them for teaching spatial concepts (left, right, inside, outside, top, bottom, etc.) as well! You can even mix it up with some temporal concepts (night or day)!THE ACTIVITY: Hide and seek!
To target spatial concepts, here:s what you can do: Hide the dolls all over the doll house. Be creative, if it's too obvious a place, your child won't have to look very hard. Try putting dolls inside the closet, under the bed, or even on the roof.
Parent: Oh no! Where's Polly? I can't find Polly. Where is she?Child: She's right there!
Parent: Really? Where?
Child: There! There!
Parent: Is she in the bedroom or the bathroom?
Child: In the bedroom!
Parent: Really? Is she under the bed or on the bed?
Child: Polly's under the bed!
Parent: Oh, there she is!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TOY: BUBBLES
Young and old, bubbles remain a favorite toy for everyone (yes, even me!). There's something magical about water solution that makes floating spherical rainbow colored objects appear. Most children have so much fun making them, running after them, popping them, and even tasting them. Bubbles are also a great ice breaker: I use bubbles to engage new and young clients who are initially shy with me and soon my kids are asking for more bubbles all on their own without me having to elicit any responses. Furthermore, bubbles help children learn to expel air (a very important concept in learning how to speak as air needs to be forced outside of the mouth in order to make sounds!) and have immediate feedback (bubbles or no bubbles?) regarding their effort.
THE ACTIVITY: Bubble fun!
This is one activity I would recommend doing outside the house, in the garden, or even just a big open room. Show your child how to blow bubbles and let him enjoy running after them first. After a few tries, try to teach your child to blow the bubbles himself. He may need a lot of help in order to do so. For children who start to feel frustrated that they aren't making bubbles yet, I usually sit behind them and tell them we'll blow the bubbles together. Even if it's actually my breath that makes the bubbles, at least my kids were trying with me! Use this activity to teach simple verbs too: open (the bubble jar), dip, blow, pop, catch, run!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TOY: WOODEN PUZZLES
These aren't your ordinary puzzles: they're wooden. I prefer the big wooden ones because they're usually easier to grab and hold for kids. The jigsaw puzzles you or I might make is probably very very hard for children to do yet. Aside from easy grabbing, wooden puzzles often have simple fitted shapes for easy slotting in of the puzzle pieces. Plus, they also come in themed sets so it's easy to start teaching your child about categorization.THE ACTIVITY: Obstacle course
Set up an obstacle course, any kind would be fine since children love any excuse to move around. You could set up mats on a line and have your child jump on them until he reaches the end where the wooden puzzles are. Ask him to follow your directions in getting the puzzle pieces, then come back to the start of the obstacle course where he will have to put the pieces into the puzzle board. Repeat until finished. There are plenty of different directions you could give to help your child develop his receptive language skills. As with most everything, it will depend on your child's skills and goal, but here are some examples to get you started:
Vocabulary building: "Get the stethoscope."
"Can you get the ambulance?"
Auditory memory: "Get the milk, shopping cart, and eggs."
"Get me two red fruits and three yellow fruits."
Categorization: "Get all the fruits."
"Get one vehicle--that's things we ride in."
Association of object use: "What do we use to brush our teeth?"
"Get the things we use when we eat."
Association of object to object: "Get what goes with toothpaste."
"Spoon goes with?"
Object descriptions: "Get the animal that has four legs, a tail, lives in the safari, and is black and white in color."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TOY: DOCTOR SETA doctor toy set is another easily findable and rather economic way to develop your child's pretend play skills. It's a step up from using cooking toy sets which are familiar to the child because they see it everyday when they eat or watch someone cook, but it's still familiar enough to be playable for a child since visits to the doctor are fairly common for children. Plus if they've had shots at the doctor, chances are they're still rather traumatized by it and therefore they remember it well. Yes, there really is a silver lining to everything, even traumatic doctor visits!
THE ACTIVITY: Visit the doctor
If your child is still traumatized about going to the doctor, you might want to pretend to be the patient first or have one of your child's stuffed toys pretend to be the patient. Playing doctor is another great activity for vocabulary building as you tell your child the names of things. Try and build up your child's memory recall by asking him things like, "When we went to see your doctor, what did she do? You're right, she put on the stethoscope like that and put it on your chest. And then what?" This may also help your child's narrative skills by having him recount his experiences in longer sentences or paragraphs.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TOY: COLORING BOOKS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TOY: BOARD GAME SNAKES AND LADDERS This one might be a little pricier than most of the other toys on this list, but there are still some pretty affordable kinds out there. You might not want to buy board games before your child is around school age, but you still could start them out early. Board games teach a number of things to children including social rules like waiting for your turn, paying attention to other people when it's their turn, counting the numbers on the dice, following the unspoken rules of a game with peers or adults, and not to mention the rules of the game itself. Snakes and Ladders is a good beginner board game as it's pretty straight forward: go up the ladder and go down the snake! So if you're going to start buying board games for your little ones, I suggest getting Snakes and Ladders to start. It's a classic!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And that rounds off my list of 10 of the most common, affordable, and useful toys to get for a little play time fun with your child at home! Now that I've made play time a bit easier for all you parents, why not take an hour out of today to go and try out some of the activities I've suggested in this post? And tell me how it goes, I'd love to hear from all of you!
No comments:
Post a Comment