Before we get started… Ascend Speech Therapy has moved! We are thrilled to be offering services in Ocean County, New Jersey and Monmouth County, New Jersey. We will continue to offer teletherapy to all of Maryland and New Jersey area! Now, let’s get to it!
It is well known that reading to your children from birth (and even before!) can help to develop early literacy and language skills. Adding in toys that match characters or objects within your book is a great way to take the language concepts from the story and bring it to life! Allowing your child to have this multi-sensory experience while hearing the vocabulary that matched what they are experiencing is a perfect recipe for language learning and generalization (taking a skill from one context, and applying it in another!) It’s also an excellent way to model and practice pretend play, another big player in language learning and development!
You’d be surprised at how many items you have around the house already that will be helpful to use when reading a book! For example, if you’re reading a book with a Lion, look around for a lion toy or figurine. If you’re reading a book about fruit, grab a real apple or a toy apple! As you read each page, model the words and actions from the book with your toy (“the lion is jumping! jump, jump, jump!” “the lion is sleeping, shhh!” “He is eating the apple!” ) Remember to keep your language concrete (“jump, jump, jump!” vs. “honey, look over here at the lion jumping so high!”) Encourage your child to play along, and enjoy this new twist to your story time!
Jackie Anderson, MS CCC-SLP is a certified speech-language pathologist, and owner of Ascend Speech Therapy, LLC.
Ascend Speech Therapy offers in-home and community based pediatric speech therapy and evaluations in Ocean County, NJ and Monmouth County, NJ,
in addition to teletherapy services for all of New Jersey and Maryland.