Explain how play and activities are used to support the development of speech, language and communication.
Children learn continuously through play and play activities are especially useful to support the development of speech, language and communication. Play and activities offer the opportunity to listen.
With play and activities children and young people have opportunities to practice social skills such as turn taking
Through play you can encourage first words for example by ‘’ready, steady, go games’’ If you say ‘’Ready, steady’’ and then pause, a child will quickly learn to say go to get the bubbles or a car to move. You can encourage a lot of words by using this technique of pausing.
Play activities use a lot of repetition of words and children learn new vocabulary through hearing these words.
Play activities also offer the opportunity to model correct speech sounds, if a child is naming thins but using the wrong sound for example ‘’dat’’ for ‘’cat’’ by just repeating the word correctly or by saying to the child ‘’oh you mean the cat’’, you can correct a child’s speech in a way that is non-threatening and does not affect their confidence.
Vocabulary can also be expanded through play if a child is naming a car, you can expand this by saying ‘’big car’’, ‘’red car’’ and ‘’fast car’’.
Play activities are also good for learning verbs or doing words, for example playing with dolls and making them ‘’jump’’, ‘’sit’’, ‘’eat’ ’drink’’ etc. Also descriptive words such as colours, big and small and such as on and under
Reading books to children can develop early language and literacy skills, again there is a lot of repetition of words and also the use of grammar.
Singing songs and saying nursery rhymes with children is also useful because rhythm and rhyme can help with speech development.
With older children play activities are a ideal opportunity to model correct grammar.
The importance of play is that you are not forcing...