Speech at the Farm!

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Hi everyone! With the holidays coming up, I thought it might be fun to talk about different common toys and how they can be used to help your child develop speech and language skills.


When I moved from my first Elementary School to Early Childhood about 5 years ago, I decided to buy some toys that I thought would be helpful. I scoured eBay and found a Fisher Price Farm set. I chose my particular set because it came with a variety of animals and made noise. Fast forward to now… for the first time in my career, I am not working with preschool students. The farm set was collecting dust in my garage until a few weeks ago, when I decided to clean it up and bring it in for C to play with. Y’all… he loves this toy! He played independently for about 20 minutes on it (and he never does that). As I was playing with him last week, I thought of several ways to use the farm set to build speech and language skills.
  1. Prepositions
Prepositions are something that are challenging, especially for kids with language delays. I can’t count the number of times per week that I ask a child where something is and they respond with “over there.” The farm set is great for targeting: on top, in, out, on, up, down and beside. Just narrating or drawing attention to where things are (i.e., The cow is in his pin. Can you put the pig in the mud?) will introduce your child to these types of words. When asking where questions to your child, if they answer “over there,” follow up their response with the specific prepositional phrase to model a more advanced answer.
  1. Following directions
Building auditory memory skills and the ability to follow novel directions is also an important skill as children get closer to elementary school. Many of our household directions are within the context of a routine, which is wonderful, especially when trying to help young children learn to understand and follow directions. As kids get older, it’s important to ensure that they are able to understand different directives. When playing with the farm set, you can ask your child to pick up certain toys and put them in different areas of the farm (Can you find the pig and put him in the mud? I think the cow looks hungry… can you pick him up and put him in the grass so that he can eat). Start out simple (with one or two steps) and grow to more complex with modifiers as your child is more able to follow the directives. For a more fun twist, you could play a farm version of Simon Says (or Old Macdonald Says if you’d like to stick with the theme)!
  1. Verbs
The farm is full of verbs and different things for the animals to do. You could target present tense verbs such as eating, sleeping, drinking playing, walking, running, galloping and rolling. You could also target some irregular past tense verbs such as ate, drank and ran. Each of these verbs can be targeted by narrating what you are doing if you have a young child ( The sheep is tired. He is sleeping.  Or The pig feels silly. Pig plays in the mud). For older and more advanced children, you could ask them what the animals are doing or have them tell you a story using the farm figurines.
  1. Sing “Old MacDonald”
This is one of my favorite and (I think) easiest ways to use the farm set… singing a familiar song! I use the different animal that we have and let C choose between 2 animals to determine which one will come next in the song. We sing the song and practice matching the animal to the noise on the farm. With the song and the toy, he doesn’t even know that he is learning! :) One of my first sessions using this farm toy was an articulation session. For that child, I chose animals with his target sounds (either in the name or sound of the animal). I was able to elicit some great targets and used playing with the farm (and the language that came with it) as a reward.
  1. Animal sounds
I love this activity because it can be used with even minimally verbal students or babies. As your child chooses the animals, say the sounds. Your child will start to imitate you and associate the sounds with the animals. You can start to build up the utterance by saying one more word ( If your child says “moo,” you repeat back “cow moos” or “say moo.”)
I hope that these simple tips give you some ideas to help your child while you play! I’m also linking some of my favorite farms at the bottom. As a boy mom, we don’t currently own a doll house, however I think you could use many of these same ideas with those.

Little People Farm Playset

Little People Animal Friends Farm

 Little People Mini Farm 

 Little People Fun Sounds Farm (this is most similar to the farm we have)

 Little People Farm Animal Friends (in case you need more animals) 
Drop a comment to let me know that you enjoyed these tips! Are there any other favorite toys that you have that you would like for me to talk about?

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