1)
Plain blocks are great to promote imaginative play. When the child gets tired of playing with them as blocks, add them to the kitchen and pretend they are food. Will they be a train next? Or wood for a campfire? Playing with basic blocks can reinforce basic concepts such as "tall" and "short" in addition to social skills such as turn taking.
2)
Mr. Potato Head can help your child practice many basic concepts. You can work on body part identification while working on spatial concepts ("Do the eyes go OVER or UNDER the nose?").
3)
Research shows making animal sounds is linked to both early speech and language development AND early literacy! But that’s not all- playing with a farm set allows children to act out lots of familiar actions and scenarios (eating, sleeping, running) and provides opportunities to practice basic concepts such as prepositions (in, out, beside).
4)
Musical instruments are a wonderful way to target multiple language skills. Research has shown that music and singing stimulates multiple areas of the brain, which is great for language building. In addition to stimulating their brains, when you sing songs with your children, they are learning to hear the similarities and differences between sounds (also known as auditory discrimination), which is important for language learning and pre-reading skills. You are also teaching them new vocabulary, modeling phrase and sentence structure, exposing them to the concepts of rhyming and alliteration, and strengthening their memories. Music provides repetition, which is important for learning new concepts, and it breaks words down into sounds and syllables so that your child is better able to process them.
