What are some practical things that you can do with them, to give them the best possible start?
Social and Emotional Skills
- Have your child spend positive time away from you and other close family members
- Encourage your child to stay focused on a single task for a period of time
- Encourage your child to think of specific questions about a topic/ interest
- Talk to your child about recognising emotions, how they feel and how others feel
- Model appropriate ways to cope with anger and frustration without hitting, tantrums and running away
- Model how to resolve issues, problems and conflict positively
Independence and Personal Responsibility
- Teaching them how to and the importance of independent toileting and cleanliness
- Teaching their first name and last name
- Encourage your child to be responsible for their own belongings and backpack
- Undress/ Dress themselves independently
- Encourage your child to do their own laces, zippers, velcros, buttons or buckles
- Teach your child to open and close containers, packets
- Practicing following verbal instructions independently
Physical- Fine and Gross Motor
- Practice activities with a range of gross motor activities e.g. running, jumping, catching, kicking, hopping, skipping
- Recognise if your child is right or left dominate and encouraging them to use their dominate hand in play and activities
- Teach correct pinch grip when holding pencils, crayons etc
- Practise fine motor activities e.g. threading beads, drawing, cutting, gluing, lacing, painting, playdough
- Practise tracing, copying, drawing basic shapes, lines, numbers, letters
- Help your child to write their name with first letter as a capital and then all the other letters are lower case
- Allow your child to turn the tap on/off
Pre-Literacy Skills
- Singing nursery rhymes
- Read, read, read! Encourage your child to follow along with their finger
- After reading a book, encourage comprehension questions such as what happened before an event in the book, what will happen next etc
- Monitor your child’s grammar in sentences and model the correct sentence for them
- Show your child words and pictures when shopping for grocery items
- Play “I Spy”, just make sure to use sounds not letter names
- Enoucourage them to develop mouse, keyboard, computer, Ipad or tablet skills (in moderation, no longer than a sitting of 20 mins)
- Encourage them to talk about a story they have made up or imagined
- Encourage them to recall events from their day
- Encourage concepts of yesterday, today and tomorrow
- Look at a calendar and discuss the year, month and days of the week
If you have concerns about your child’s language or speech skills, now is the time to act! Have a look at our free checklist on our website for speech and language milestones or give us a call for more information.
This will be our last blog for the year. The team at Speak About would like to take this opportunity to THANK all our amazing clients, families and readers! We have all had fantastic year and can’t wait for 2017 to start. From all the team at Speak About we wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and safe holidays! See you in 2017!
