Partner With Parents: Activities for Teaching Language Skills At Home

Parents contribute a great deal to their children’s speech and language development. When parents of children who present communication delays or impairments acquire the knowledge and tools they need; they can gain confidence in their ability to help their child grow, learn, and improve. I have had the good fortune to observe hundreds of parents successfully contribute to the effectiveness of speech-language interventions by partnering with their child’s SLP.

Unfortunately, many parents fear they can’t help their child develop critical speech and language skills because they believe they lack the knowledge, expertise, time, and skills necessary to contribute meaningfully. It may also be difficult for many parents to find time in their busy schedules to work with their child on typical school and speech-language “homework practice” assignments. To complicate matters, speech-language pathologists may experience limited opportunities to partner with parents due to their complex workload and caseload constraints. Many indicate that they simply don’t have the bandwidth to build relationships with parents and/or the skills to create individualized parent-oriented teaching and practice resources.

I recommend providing parents with practical, understandable, fun activities they can easily employ to teach, prompt, and promote interactive communication. Provide simple explanations of communication impairments and briefly describe intervention techniques used during therapy sessions. It is helpful to suggest activities for building language skills that can be incorporated into busy home routines such as cooking, playing, traveling, etc. Employing a daily calendar format provides an organized framework for suggesting brief, practical, understandable, fun activities that parents can comfortably use to develop and improve speech and language skills.  By using SLP recommended techniques, parents and teachers can help children learn and understand basic concepts, expand vocabulary, formulate questions, talk about experiences, give and follow directions, express ideas, solve problems, plan events, and much more. Suggest activities that are appropriate for typically developing children as well as those who are experiencing problems related to conditions such as developmental delays, brain injury, lack of stimulation, or physical disabilities.

I am happy to share an example of a home instruction and practice resource I developed with these challenges and goals in mind: Let’s Talk Today! A Calendar of Daily Activities for Developing Language Skills at Home. I invite you to share the month of September with the parents of children you serve. Give it a try! I’d love to hear how it goes!

Enjoy Engaging with Families!