TIPS AND TRICKS - ONE YEAR OLDS

Last week’s blog focused primarily on typical speech and language development for one year olds. This week’s follow up are some of our therapists favorite activities and techniques that stimulate speech and language development for our youngest toddlers!

FAVORITE ACTIVITIES FOR ONE-YEAR-OLDS:

  • Teach imitation of actions! Often before our children will even imitate our words, they will imitate physical actions. This can form the foundation for the back and forth reciprocation of conversation and help with the verbal imitation later. Examples: take turn clapping your hands, throwing kisses back and forth, and playing finger games such as pat-a-cake, peek-a-boo, and the itsy-bitsy-spider.

  • Reinforce your child’s verbal attempts by maintaining eye contact, responding with encouragement, and using different patterns and emphasis.

    • Raise the pitch of your voice to indicate a question. Use sing song intonation “Uh oh! It fell down!”

    • Emphasize small words: “Where IS it? What IS it?” “BIG ball”

    • Slow your rate of speech and lower language level using only a few words in your sentences/phrases so they are easier to imitate. “Look, I see X.”

  • Talk about what you are doing, where you are going, what you will do when you arrive, and who and what you will see.

    • Self Talk- talk about what you are doing.

      • “I got the BIG BALL! I am kicking ball! Go big ball!”

    • Parallel Talk- talk about/label what the child is doing

      • “You are splashing! You got wet! You are washing your nose!”

  • Identify colors and shapes.

  • Count items, steps as you climb them, objects as you pass them out.

  • Use gestures such as waving goodbye to help convey meaning.

  • Animal sounds (particularly farm animal sounds) have a variety of age-appropriate speech sounds and a variety of vowels to help them practice. Environmental sounds like sirens, car sounds, etc. are also great for beginning imitation.

  • Acknowledge the attempt to communicate.

  • Receptive/expressive activities

    • Ex: Puzzle- Receptive- First have them find the correct items. (“Find the cow, find the horse, find the pig”). Have your child find the correct piece and put it in.

    • Ex: Puzzle - Expressive - Next have your child SAY the names/sounds of each item. (“What is it?” or choices: “Do you want PIG or COW”).

  • READ! READ! READ! READ!!! You can read the real words on the page or you can just look at the pictures and label objects in books. Read with inflection and see if your child can imitate the repeated phrases in books.

Amanda Garner