(L413) Astounding things we can do together! Language comprehension and verbal reasoning workout

Description

LOCKDOWN FREEBIE: To support other speech pathologists, speech pathology students, and parents in the same boat during the school holidays, we’ve made this telehealth language resource free for everyone to download during lockdown. This resource includes more than 160 questions requiring verbal reasoning/inferences, and 25 activity ideas – many of which can be done at home or planned during lockdown.

Many children look forward to the holidays for weeks, only to declare “I’m bored!” after two days.

Some retreat into solo activities like computer gaming, or down mindless YouTube rabbit holes, like glazed Zombies. In an effort to drag kids away from screens, parents and other carers feel pressured to spend money to keep children talking to each other and engaged.

It doesn’t have to be that way!

In this oral language stimulation resource, we highlight 24 free or low-cost activities for preschoolers and young school-aged children that are almost guaranteed to stimulate conversation, problem solving and verbal reasoning.

For each activity, we pose several Blank’s Level 4 questions to practice skills like abstract thinking, sequencing, making predictions, divergent thinking, processing negatives, problem solving and drawing inferences in familiar contexts.

Even better, we encourage kids to get out into the world and to explore some of the amazing things we all take for granted including:

• gathering around a family campfire;
• having a sleepover with friends;
• dressing up and acting out;
• putting a message in a bottle;
• hosting a garage (or yard) sale;
• hosting a home Olympics;
• hammering projects;
• digging for fossils;
• catching bugs;
• watching a sunrise;
• photographing a lizard or a frog;
• tying some knots;
• listening to an adult’s records;
• backyard or park twitching;
• holding a paper plane competition;
• making your own comics;
• sowing (and reaping) a vegetable garden;
• staging a stuffed toy or robot party; and
• making a terrarium with a jar.

As those old ads used to say: Life: be in it!

The resource can be used for face-to-face sessions or for distance learning/telehealth sessions.