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Language Development Activities for PreSchool Age Children

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Fun Language Development Activities You Can Do with Your Preschooler

Many years ago while I was in school, I had the chance to co-lead a preschool language stimulation class. It was a lot of hard work, and it taxed my brain to come up with fun and creative ways to stimulate minds and provide language enrichment experiences for 8 or 9 youngsters every single day.

Some young children are a bit slower than others in picking up language and they require some extra attention to both language expression and comprehension to do well once they enter school. However, even for children that are developing language right on schedule, stimulating greater expressive language skills, creativity, and imagination will further enhance their later academic experiences.

I wanted to share a few tips and ideas for language development activities that parents, or even teachers, can use to make learning fun.

All drawings on this page are credited to: davef3138.

A Few Tips to Get You Started.

I am going to share with you a language development activity just to get you started. It can be adapted in many ways based on your child's performance and abilities; I'll talk about that a bit more later. First, I wanted to give you some basic tips that you can use anytime you're working (or playing) with a child to encourage them to express themselves.

Try to use more open ended questions. In other words, ask questions that invite phrase or sentence length answers, not a single word like "yes", "no", or someone's name. For instance, "What's going on?" will tend to get a longer answer than "Who's jumping over the dog?"

Ask for elaboration. If the response you get is just a single word or perhaps a phrase, ask more questions to get them to elaborate. For instance, if the child says "boy jumping", then you can ask, "What's the boy jumping over?"

Model longer phrases when necessary. If the child then says "the dog" you can put the sentence together. "Oh, I see the boy's jumping over the dog on the sidewalk". "Why is he doing that?"

Clearly there's much, much more to language stimulation than this, but these little tips will be useful no matter what language development activity you do.

Story Telling and Language Development

One of my favorite language development activities involves story telling. Even children with very limited language skills can enjoy building and telling a story. For children who are not delayed in their language acquisition, the more advanced forms of this activity can be great for stimulating imagination and even greater language skills.

In both cases, I found story telling to be an activity that the children soon loved.

I often used wordless picture books for these types of activities but, being a student, I also often resorted to creating my own materials based upon my tight budget. The example I provide here is exactly that; home made. You're free to use if of course, but you can probably develop your own, for even better results!

Starting Out with Story Telling

In the example I provide here, I put together a series of pictures. They can be on flash cards, taken from magazines, or whatever. In my example, I took an hour or so to photograph some things. I made sure that I included some action or activity in my shots.

There are a variety of things you can do with these photographs or pictures. For a child that isn't expressing themself, it might be more appropriate to have them begin by pointing out items in the pictures as you describe them. Hearing a story, hearing connected speech is important for children who aren't yet talking. For those with some expressive ability, a start can be made by simply having them name the subject of the picture or perhaps describing the pictures/stating what the character is doing.

A task that is a bit more advanced cognitively, is to ask the child to caption the photograph or to describe what a character within the picture is thinking.

Our Practice Materials and Your Assignment

Here are the shots I took to demonstrate a typical story telling activity for language development.

This should be a fun activity. In fact, please go ahead and try this phase of it for yourself. Look at the photographs and try to caption at least a few of them. Use your imagination and your sense of humor to make some statement about what you see. Tell me what the character is thinking, what's happening, or just come up with a creative caption; we don't have to be putting together a story at this point.

I don't want to prescribe the story line, so I will just say that Batman has awakened to find himself in a strange place, surrounded by things and beings that are much, much larger than himself. He's in quite a predicament.

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Language Development Activities for PreSchool Age Children

Fun Language Development Activities You Can Do with Your Preschooler

A Few Tips to Get You Started.

Story Telling and Language Development

Starting Out with Story Telling

Our Practice Materials and Your Assignment

Add Your Own Caption or Vote on Others

1

I can't shake the feeling that something's watching me.

2

Meet my new parter. What can I say... he ate Robin!

3

I said I wanted to meet CATman... not Batman!!

4

Which one is the superhero?

5

uh what the heck is this?

6

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1

Who'd have guessed flour could be so slippery?

2

I programme the Satnav to take me to the Batcave... look where I've ended up!

3

Don't eat me

4

I don't taste good in cookies!

5

Hey what can i say my grandma told me if you put your heart into your cakes they'll taste really good, if i put my whole body in there it should taste better right?

6

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1

Ice cream!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2

There's always time for chocolate

3

Ahhh Lava

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1

Nah na na na na na na na na na na na na na na Bat pan!

2

Yowza!

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1

I think I'll just lay here awhile.

2

I didn't see that coming!

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1

You're tickling me Cat Woman.

2

Nothing like a spit bath to make it all better.

3

Ouch! Don't you know that thing's rough?

4

Please don't eat me!

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1

I always knew I'd end up with all the dirtbags and hairballs of the world.

2

Sucker!!

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1

Maybe if I'm REAL quiet, he'll fall asleep again. Shhhh!

2

What's that strange rumbling sound?

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1

Must...call....911

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