Speech therapy activities for preschoolers need to be fun, engaging, and easy to do at home. These activities will help your child practice important speech and language skills. So, you have a preschooler who is having trouble with speech or language? Well, you’re in the right place! I have lots of free preschool speech therapy activities that are perfect for home practice.
Preschool speech therapy activities can be a fun and productive addition to a speech therapy session. While the main focus of speech therapy is to improve communication skills, this activity time can help build rapport between the therapist and child while allowing time to practice the new skills that have been taught.
Speech therapy activities should be structured so that the child has an opportunity to use his communication skills in a fun way. Activities should not be too complicated and should always involve some type of verbal interaction between the child and the therapist.
Speech therapy activities can also practice concepts such as colors, numbers, shapes, or letters. The following are some preschool speech therapy activities that you can use with your preschooler.
Speech therapy is a great way to help your child develop the speech and language skills they need to succeed. If you have a preschooler, you may be wondering how to teach them at home. Here are some fun activities that you can do with your child to improve their speech and language skills:
- Read together every day for at least 15 minutes. This will help them develop vocabulary and listening skills that will be important for learning how to read later on.
- Play games like hide-and-seek or Simon Says, which require following directions and understanding the differences between words like “hide” vs “seek.”
- Teach them some basic sign language such as: “please,” “thank you,” etc… This will help them learn how to communicate with others when they can’t speak yet! You can also use signs while reading books so they’ll understand what’s happening in the story even if they don’t know all of the words yet!
- Use puppets or dolls to act out stories from books as well as familiar situations like going shopping or getting ready for bedtime (e., brushing teeth). This activity helps your child learn about emotions, social interactions and cause-and-effect relationships — all while having fun.
This free preschool speech therapy activities also explains the skills needed for communication, including gestures, cooing sounds, babbling, imitating sounds/words, mimicking facial expressions/movements, understanding what others say and understand what they want you to do, understanding when you are talking too much or not enough (also known as “mama’s boy” or “mama’s girl”), and building vocabulary.
For those of you who can’t afford speech therapy, these free preschool speech therapy activities are a great way to practice speech sounds and develop listening skills. Make sure your child has a wide variety of toys around the house so he or she can play with them throughout the day as part of their free preschool speech therapy activities.
All preschool teachers will want to get their hands on this speech therapy lesson plan. With so many activities targeted towards the development of communication, even teachers who are not looking to start teaching speech therapy in the classroom can find value in this plan.
The first lesson of the full-year program is built around an activity that helps your child identify four different sounds from their environment: Muffled sounds like footsteps or car engines. A door closing or opening. A baby crying. A dog barking. These sounds will be practiced and mixed together with various syllables and eventually mixed with words that make sense for your child’s age range (babble, baa, ba-ba).