Written by Brigid McNamara – Senior Speech Pathologist
I often have parents of primary and upper-primary students ask me how to support their child’s language development at home during “home practise”. Younger children learn through play, so this can be easier for parents to target at home. But as your child gets into the older years at primary school, they become less interested in traditional ‘play’ and this can be difficult for busy parents to change the ways they have been supporting their child up until now.
Your Speech Pathologist will tell you that it is very beneficial to continue language activities at home to give your child more practise of what they are learning in their Speech sessions each week. But what does home practise look like for an older child? How do you make those changes necessary to suit your older child better?
Why Home Practise is Important
When it comes to language development, consistency is the foundation of progress. Engaging in regular language practise at home can significantly enhance the skills being developed during Speech sessions. This might look like 5 minutes each day for 7 days per week, or it might look like 20 minutes 3 days per week. This routine not only reinforces the targets and techniques introduced during therapy, but also boosts the child’s confidence in everyday interactions and different environments.
Making Home Practise Effective and Engaging
Practising at home doesn’t have to mean setting up a classroom-style environment. It can look like either:
- Incorporating the home practise into your everyday routine, or
- Giving your child an additional task to think about while doing something in their everyday routine
This can be hard to motivate your child and for you to think of tasks for them to do. I have 3 ways to help you embed this into your everyday more easily!
1. Choose a time that you can ask your child to do their Speech practise: Think of a time when your child is a captive audience in their everyday routine. For example, this might include the drive to or from school or family dinner time in the evenings. These times can be optimal because there is ‘nothing else for them to do or be distracted by’.
2. Think about what your child likes to do / engage in for a long time? This might be a job around the home, a leisure activity or even hanging out with a friend or sibling. This will be extra motivating for your child and might even disguise the fact that they are doing home practise!
3. Think about what you can add to this activity to relate it to your child’s therapy goals? We don’t want to ‘take away’ from what they like to do. Instead, add something to what it is they like to do. This might look like asking your child to write down instructions on how to do their favourite activity, describe how to play their favourite game using specific vocabulary or explain how to do their favourite job at home.
Examples:
- If your child loves gardening, you can ask them to write down instructions on how to do something in the garden (e.g. each step of watering the plants or instructions outlining the schedule of different garden tasks during the week). You can give them specific words they must include in this writing (it can be any of the words they are working on in their Speech sessions – I would suggest to focus on just 2 or 3 of these words each time).
- If you child has a favourite Xbox or PlayStation game, you can ask them to write a description on how to play the game, one of the characters or what is required of each level. Make sure to give them specifications like certain words or concepts to include (your Speech therapy goals).
- If your child has a favourite tv show, you can ask them to write a summary of what happened in each episode. Again, you can give them 2-3 ‘focus words’ that they have to use in this summary. You can even go further and ask your child to write their own episode based on the tv show so they can be creative about a topic they enjoy! You can also be creative with HOW they do this – maybe they also really enjoy drawing and so they can make their own comic strip or illustrate a picture of the characters doing something in their imagined episode.
Hopefully these simple steps can help to decrease your brain capacity to think of how to implement your child’s Speech home practise. If this is still very tricky, or you have tried all of your ideas, I have 2 more tips that can be helpful…
2 Extra Tips:
1. Ask your Clinician! Your Speech Pathologist is very well-versed in thinking of different ways to implement goals into activities and tasks. They can be another person to bounce ideas off of or give some inspiration for different activities to do for home practise that are unique for your child’s interests and goals.
2. Use board games that can give lots of opportunities for your child to practise the language or other goals they are targeting in their Speech sessions. This makes it fun and can involve the whole family – building connection and also being entertaining for all!
Some examples of games you might try at home could be Taboo, Chameleon, Articulate, Code Names, Hues & Cues or Thinkle. These 3 steps and 2 extra tips should be useful for you when you feel like you aren’t sure how to go about implementing home practise for your upper-primary-aged child. By following these 3 steps and utilising the 2 extra tips as needed, your child’s home practise can be tailored specifically for them and they then have the opportunity to further solidify the goals they are targeting in their Speech therapy. Remember that this might look like 1 small task per day, or even 5 minutes of an activity per day. Even so, this time and practise in situations outside of the therapy room can mean your child has significant gains in their therapy goals!