Our Favorite Toys for Preschool Language Promotion
As the work of young people, play is serious business! Play time helps children learn and grow by promoting peer interactions, problem solving, and language skills (just to name a few!) As speech and language therapists, play is the environment in which we model speech and language skills to preschoolers. To get a glimpse of how we do just that, check out our three favorite toys and how we use them in speech therapy:
These “presents” are always a hit with the kiddos! Apart from the suspenseful excitement that presents always bring, they also provide endless opportunities for language. These presents are coded by both color and number, allowing children to practice labeling, matching, and sequencing. This set is also ideal when working on prepositions. Children can place the toy in the present, on top of the present, beside the present, in between two presents and so on! Lastly, these little gift boxes lend themselves wonderfully to a guessing game where language is used to provide both hints and guesses as to whose inside!
Classic Magna-Tiles, similar to Legos, provide hours of building fun! When used in speech therapy, these tiles provide the perfect context for working on verbs in the past, present, and future tense. In the past tense, verbs such as “fell, built, and snapped” can all be used to describe what happened while building their masterpiece. In the present tense, we model phrases such as, “I am building, “the tiles are snapping,” “oh no! They’re crashing!” etc. We can also model the use of future tense verbs and ask questions that require critical thinking such as, “It's getting tall. Do you think it will fall? How could we make it stronger?” etc. Magna-Tiles are just such a fun way to begin incorporating those action words!
Who doesn't love Pop the Pig? Children love feeding the pig hamburgers and pushing down on the chef’s hat until his belly pops! This game is one of our favorites for good reason - it allows for so much language! We use Pop the Pig to model functional phrases with lots of repetition. Phrases such as “go in burger, go in [color], push down!, I see [color, burger, number, pig, etc.],” and “your turn.” In describing our actions while feeding this hungry piggy, we allow children the opportunity to practice using phrases in a low stakes, fun environment.