Water Play in Speech Therapy
Water play and preschoolers are a natural combination.
You’ll find all kinds of natural language opportunities and you can easily engineer articulation practice into water play too.
Last week’s focus was final “sh’, so of course the topic was fish.
We work on lots of wh questions during story-book reading,
but also include describing, categories, prepositions, basic concepts and sentence formulation too.
How? Just start off with an “I wonder” statement. “I wonder where fish live?” Hmmm, this is a goldfish. I wonder what other kinds there are? I wonder if all fish are small like this one.” Children love to have a conversation with you, and you will encourage more than the usual one-word answer that a direct what? or who? or where? question will generate. You are discovering things together!
Time to break out the bucket and wash a fish.
Not having any cute goldfish at my disposal, we used the sharks. Add a washcloth, sponge and a toothbrush, and those sharks were in for a scrubbing! (Articulation targets included wash, fish, and toothbrush)
Lots of great language happened while we were elbow deep in suds and water!
We talked about verbs and synonyms: wash, clean, scrub, brush, rinse. There were plenty of descriptive words to discuss too: wet, dry, soapy, bubbly, shiny. So much fun!
Ready to “dive in” and bring in some water play?
I would love to hear about your favorite activities that make a splash!
Check out more great water activities here and link up your water play posts! Thanks for stopping by.