Dynamic Speech Duo: home practice

Showing posts with label home practice. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Winter Home Practice Activities

Welcome back to school Dolphin families! We hope you all had a nice winter break with your families.

We have some books and a list of free winter themed apps for you to to use at home to encourage good speech and language with your children.

1) PBS Parents Play and Learn: features a winter background and dozens of new stickers for lots of winter fun! Build a snowman! Count snowflakes! Play in the snow with polar bears and penguins! Go sledding with characters.

Key Features
-13 interactive games that automatically adjust to a child’s level
- A variety of proven methods used to build early math and literacy skills
- Completely bilingual (English/Spanish)
- Over 100 everyday and seasonal stickers in free-play area
- Parent ‘teachable moments’ tips associated with each game
- Easy hands-on activities and game-related resources updated regularly
- New activities and resources added weekly
- Social sharing feature

2) Animals: Sounds & Games

This app will help your child get ahead in early childhood education. For example, challenges inside of the app will help your young child:
- improve fine motor and spatial orientation skills (especially in jigsaw puzzle),
- develop logical thinking and attention to detail,
- instill leadership skills
- enrich vocabulary
- exercise memory

3) Snow Fest- Joyful Celebration

This app would be good for both younger and older students. With this app you can take pictures of your student or family and apply winter weather filters (skiing, skating, snowboarding, snow balls, etc) and winter accessories (gloves, hats, boots, etc). Talk with your children about:
-what is going on in the pictures

-how the people feel (cold, happy, etc) and why ("They are cold because of the snow", "They are happy because they are skiing" "I think they are happy because they are smiling", etc)

-where you think the people are ("I think they are in the mountains because.....")

4) Happy Feet Two: The Penguin App

This is a good app for your student working on speech sounds. There is a

section of this app called "The Talking Penguin" where your student can say their target words and the penguin will repeat them! Your student can listen for correct productions of their sounds.

Here are some of our favorite winter themed books to read at home with your children. With these books you can target concepts such as: story comprehension (who, what, when, where, why questions), categorization (winter clothing, foods, winter animals, etc), feelings (tired, excited, happy, etc), sequencing (steps for getting dressed) and you can always have your child listen for words that contain their target speech sounds.

1) The Bear Snores On by Karma Wilson

2) The Mitten by Jan Brett

3) There Was a Cold Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow by Lucille Colandro

4) Froggy Gets Dressed by Jonathan London

5) Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Bill Martin Jr

6) Three Snow Bears by Jan Brett

Friday, September 18, 2015

Free Apps of the Week

Here are some of our favorite apps to work on speech and language skills. They are all free for download and are "kid approved" for a lot of fun!

1) Let's Name Things Fun Deck: Select the cards you want your child to see, and have them name items to practice vocabulary, categorizing, and thinking skills. The prompts include statements like, “Let’s name… things that live in the ocean.” and “Let’s name… things you’d take on a trip.”

2) Bluster!: This word matching game helps to develop vocabulary and word understanding for school-aged children. Your child will practice matching rhyming words, prefixes and suffixes, synonyms, homophones, adjectives, and more. Bluster includes over 800 vocabulary words. Players choose a skill to practice and then try to make matches of three. Ten matches wins a round. This can be played as an individual game or a game for 2 children.

3) Word Games for Kids - Futaba:   Futaba is a 2-4 player game designed for school aged children. This word quiz game can be used at home or in the classroom as a entertaining way to build language skills.   It was originally designed for ESL students but is a wonderful resource for working on language skills with any child.

4) I Hear Ewe: Entertain and educate your child with this simple game full of 24 different authentic animal sounds and 12 different vehicle sounds. When your child taps on an animal or vehicle icon, the game will verbally announce what type of animal or vehicle it is and play a recording of its real sound. You have the option of selecting English, Spanish, German or Chinese for the verbal descriptions. You can also turn off the verbal descriptions and hear only the item's sound when an icon is tapped. This app is a great way to introduce your child to animals and vehicles and reinforce this vocabulary. Also helps develop your child's motor skills while keeping them entertained.

We hope you find these apps useful at home while practicing with your child on their individual speech and language goals.