With social distancing and quarantine measures in effect at the moment, it’s important to keep our kids busy and take their mental health into consideration! Here are some fun activities to stimulate your children’s brains & bodies while keeping them occupied!
Consider implementing speech and language therapy techniques while doing these activities with your kids!
1. Live Animal Learnings:
This is a fun and free opportunity to take advantage of!
- Cincinnati Zoo – Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden will be doing daily Facebook Live streams at 3 pm EST teaching about different animals and giving an at-home activity for you to do with your children. This is a very fun way to keep those young ones interested and learning!
- Georgia Aquarium – Ocean Voyager Webcam
2. Baking with your kids:
Baking with your kids can really help with modeling language. A great therapy tip here is to use the Self-Talk method. Use short sentences to talk about what you are seeing, hearing, feeling, or doing. For example: “Mommy is making cookies! I am mixing the batter! Let’s put them in the oven!”
3. Reading Time:
If your children are old enough to read, have them read to you! If not, pick a certain book of their liking and read a few pages of it to them everyday. Books with pictures are encouraged to promote parallel talk! For example: “Wow, look at this picture! It’s a RED car!”
4. Outdoor Scavenger Hunt:
Make sure to schedule daily outdoor playtime. Have them search for these objects outdoors. When they find an object, expand upon the object and consider using language therapy techniques. For example, if they find a leaf say: “Yes, this is a brown leaf!”
5. Activity Dice Game:
This is a great game to play with your kids to put some of the tips from their Speech Therapist to use! Have your children roll the dice and encourage them to have fun in a make believe setting. This activity can incorporate communication development through sounds and gestures.
6. Virtual Story Time:
These websites provide great stories for young children and allow you to really pair language with each story. We at Talk About Therapy love incorporating these into our therapy sessions!
7. Arts and Crafts:
Arts & Crafts : Arts and crafts are a great way to get your kids’ creative juices flowing! Encourage them to get a little messy and have fun. This is a great way to introduce colors and textures as well.
8. Fun Science Experiments:
Encourage your kids to perform easy and fun science experiments such as slime making. Here is an amazing list of easy to do science experiments with household items!
9. Teacherspayteachers.com:
This is a great website to find digital downloads of hundreds of activities! They range from coloring pages to brain-teasers for kids. They offer more than 3 million free and paid resources, created by educators!
