Speech Therapy Activities at Home During Quarantine

Do you need inspiration for speech therapy activities at home during quarantine? Over three fourths of the country has suspended public schools in light of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Social isolation rules mean that many young children with special educational needs are now cut off from the professionals that were helping them. But there is no need for parents to despair. Lynne Alba Speech Therapy Solutions, striving to deliver the best speech and language therapy in LA County for over 20 years, offers these speech therapist-approved exercises!

Ideas for Speech Therapy Activities to Do at Home

Working on speech and language development doesn’t have to stop because school is out. Be sure not to let your child binge on screen time and keep the television off when it isn’t in active use. Contrary to popular belief, television as background noise does nothing to help child speech development. Hopefully, you have already been working with your child on their speech and language skills using ideas your family’s speech language pathologist provided. Some of these ideas are perfect for parents who are working from home as a result of the outbreak.

Make your own magnetic flash cards: With a sheet of magnet paper and basic card stock, you can cut out 2 square inch magnets on which you can draw commonly needed items, such as a cup, food, bed, your child’s favorite toy, and more. Your child can help color them in, and you can prompt your child in talking about the items on the cards. The goal is to reduce your child’s frustration by giving them something they can use to communicate needs if they are too tired, frustrated, or upset to use their words. When children struggling with verbal communication run into frustration while trying to articulate themselves, they become more likely to misbehave.
This is a car game more than a home game, but it works anywhere. Practice phonemes with your child by playing the sound game. You introduce a sound, such as /t/, and a word that uses it, like ‘tree’. Your child must think of another word that begins with that sound, such as ‘truck’, and produce it. Then it is your turn again. This is a good one to play in the car because your child will be exposed to a lot of objects to motivate their imagination.
A good game for children of reading age is flashlight hide and seek. Stick words up around your home and turn out the lights, then give your child a flashlight to explore and find the word cards. When they find a word, they should say it out loud.
Did you know that story time can itself be a great activity to help children with language delays? It helps if you can find a book that gives lots of opportunity for you to produce melodramatic oohs and aahs, silly voices, and other noises to entertain your child. Repeat readings of books help children in their vocabulary learning and sentence structure efforts.
An activity you can do on your balcony, driveway, patio, or yard is word hopscotch. Instead of the traditional numbers, each hopscotch square can have a different picture, letter, or color. Activities that combine physical movement with learning and drilling other skills are often more successful in achieving their educational goals.

Practical Speech Therapy Activities for Home Practice

There are other activities that don’t necessarily involve practicing verbal skills but instead producing speech sounds or the kind of muscle control your child might be doing in speech therapy sessions.

One activity that SLPs have been trying out is easy to replicate at home. It’s called straw golf, and it needs a few everyday items. Cotton balls, straws, and paper or plastic cups. Cut a cup in half lengthways so it looks like a tunnel. Put it on a table or other smooth, flat surface. Your child must blow through the straw to propel the cotton ball into the cup, or ‘hole’. The therapy idea behind this activity is that the practice with (and strengthening of) oral muscles necessary to concentrate breath through a straw will improve a child’s oral motor development. In turn, this will improve their ability to produce speech sounds.
Another oral motor development activity involving straws that can be a lot of fun, if a little messy, is straw painting. Drop a few blobs of paint onto a piece of paper and your child can have fun blowing the paint into different shapes on the paper.
Similarly, simply blowing bubbles can be a fun activity for your child. Bubble-blowing helps children work on their pucker and lip rounding, necessary for forming sounds such as /u:/ (as in ‘shoot’). There are a lot of vocabulary words you can practice with young children: ‘up’, ‘big’, ‘pop’, ‘uh-oh’, and ‘fly’.
Very young kids love this mirror game, another activity that can provide opportunity to practice motor skills. Put a small, stationary mirror in front of your child so they can see their face. Then pull a silly face for them and tell them to copy you. Your child will be amused by the silly face you’re pulling, and the act of shifting their facial expression to match yours will provide helpful practice operating facial muscles that will be necessary for forming more complex phonemes.

With these great ideas, you can help your child practice their speech and language skills even without regular access to their speech therapist. Lynne Alba Speech Therapy Solutions wishes the best for your family during this time of national emergency and social distancing. If you want to contact us to discuss your child’s speech development further, you can contact our staff directly through our website.