It's the Little Things...

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. Prepositions Prepositions are something that are challenging, especiall...

Hi everyone! I’m dropping by today to share some of our favorite Halloween songs. A few years ago, I worked at an early childhood school. I LOVED working with 3-5 year olds. They are so much fun and soak up EVERYTHING! One of the easiest ways to teach young children like is through songs (think about the ABC song). Kids pick them up and sing them without really knowing their meaning. I feel it’s my job as a SLP and mom to help them to connect that language and vocabulary to real world situations. C has picked up SO many words from our songs that we’ve listened to this Fall. If your child is young and you haven’t introduced TV or screen time yet, you can still listen to these songs. Over the summer, we bought a bluetooth speaker from the dollar spot at Target for $5. We put the YouTube songs on my phone, connected it to the speaker and Voila! It was one of C’s favorite activities! Here are links to some of our favorites: Super Simple Songs Knock Knock, Trick or Treat ...

Reading to your child is one of the easiest ways to foster a lifelong love of learning and reading. From an early age, reading helps you and your child to bond, and also introduces new vocabulary and correct grammar. Our pediatrician recommended 30 minutes of reading each day when C was only 6 months old. It’s SO important! Something this simple can easily be turned into an activity to help model and improve your child’s speech and language skills. Here are 5 simple things that you can do to make the most out of your reading time. Talk about the pictures Talking about the pictures can help with practicing every other skill in this post! :) If your child is verbal, ask them what they see in the picture. Then, build up their utterance by adding one more word. C, for instance, is emerging into the 2 word level. If I asked him about a picture, he would probably give me one noun (dog), so I would add a verb to that (dog eats). If your child told you two words (dog eats), you would...

I LOVE children’s books! As tough as it is for me to sit down and read a book for myself, I love to read books to kids both at home and at school. For a while, reading books was about all C wanted to do! The great thing is… you can embed so many speech and language skills into reading books. Reading the words typically gives a great example for sentence structure and more robust, descriptive and complex sentences than most children uses. Along with that, you can talk about the pictures, ask questions, make predictions, look for letters, talk about rhymes and so much more! Here are a few of our favorites from this season and why we love them. Links are Amazon Affiliate links. Spooky Wheels on the Bus This little book has been a favorite at home this month! C loves the familiar tune of the song, so he was singing along the first day we had the book! This book is great for toddler-preschool aged children. It introduces counting along with halloween vocabulary withou...

Hi, everyone! Last Monday, my district was off for Columbus  Day (the joys of being on a school schedule!). I was so excited to be able to spend a bonus day with C, especially since the rest of our month is pretty busy! C is 20 months old, and he is REALLY into Halloween. The older kids at his daycare talk about it, so it dominates our conversation. Since it is a topic of interest for him, I’m really trying to sneak in as much learning as I can. I know he will soak it right up! I’m here today with an easy little idea to embed vocabulary and syntax skills into something you probably already do-- going for a walk. C and I started walking and I told him that we were on a hunt for fall and Halloween items. C is mostly speaking in single words, but is emerging into those 2 word phrases. In order to encourage that, I like to use carrier phrases (a rote phrase paired with a novel word) with him. Since the carrier phrase is predictable, he is better able to process the new vocabular...

Hello, everyone! I’m back to blogging and starting a new blog. I wanted to take this first post to talk about how I got here and what I want to blog about. So here we go! A little about me… I am a Speech-Language Pathologist. I feel like most people don’t know what a SLP is or does unless you or someone you know has needed one. SLPs focus on all areas of communication, including articulation (how you make sounds, like kids who say wabbit instead of rabbit), language (understanding what is said to you and being able to express yourself using appropriate vocabulary and grammar), stuttering, voice, feeding and swallowing disorders. SLPs work with a variety of people from birth to geriatrics. Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to work with kids. When I was a kid, I remember playing school with my stuffed animals and little sister. I would take my little tykes easel out to our driveway and meticulously line up chairs for my “students” to listen to my lesson. As I grew older, m...