RECOMMENDATIONS
These recommendations are for parents to practice different activities at home. It is well known that parents are so interested in provide adequeate speech and language stimulation to their little ones. I hope that you find these set of activities helpful!!
To stimulate motor imitation skills on your children using body/gestural imitation:
Parents keep in mind that your child needs to understand the concept of motor imitation before imitating sounds. At home, you can:
- Wave bye-bye
- Clap your hands
- Touch your nose
- Touch your toes
- Place your hands on your head
- Shake your head up and down
- Lick your lips
- Blow out your cheeks
- Open your mouth
- Pucker your lips
- Smack your lips
To stimulate combining motor movements and sounds, Parents can use many hand-play songs, since they enable your child to participate in speech or singing without really saying the words. By moving his/her hands, a child is part of this activity. A child can imitate the movements to the song, and later may begin to imitate some of the words. The following hand-play songs are recommended:
- The bumble bee song
- No more monkeys
- Here we go round the Mulberry Bush
- Hokey pokey
- Ten little ants
Pre-vocalic Speech activities.
These activities can be practiced with little ones from early months up to 3 years old. Mothers can encourage their little ones to:
- Smack their lips as making kissing sounds.
- Make nasal sounds, letting the air come through their nose like a foghorn.
- Make sneezing sounds.
- Make coughing sounds.
- Make yawning sounds.
- Make happy sounds-cooing and “ahhh.”
- Make environmental sounds: car motor sounds, beeping horn sounds, vacuum cleaner noise