December Kindergarten Speech Activities You Can Do At Home
Three activity ideas you can do with your child to boost their speech and language skills.
1: Past Tense Verbs
Remember When… Regular past tense verbs end in –ed. Irregular past tense verbs don’t follow this pattern. Their endings can change (draw/drew). Both regular and irregular verbs start to develop around age 3 ½. As kids begin to learn the pattern of adding –ed to the ends of words, they can sometimes use it for irregular verbs (throwed), This is part of normal development. Irregular words don’t follow a pattern so these can take longer to learn.
2: Associations
Learning word associations is a tool for strengthening vocabulary. The more connections we have with a word, the better we understand it. This is also helpful in remembering words. Other activities for building vocabulary include defining, describing, categorizing, finding words with similar meanings (synonyms), and connecting it to your past experiences (background knowledge).
3: Parts of a Whole
Learning the parts of an object is an easy way to build vocabulary. Label the part and give your child some information about it: ”That is the hat. You wear a hat on your head.” Try picking a few common objects each week to focus on. Challenge practice the word in other situations. For example, while reading, “Let’s look for characters that have a hat.”
