Working On Your Child’s Language Skills At Home
Language proficiency consists of using language appropriately to communicate and interact with other people, both orally and in writing. This is one of the basic skills in education. But how can you work on your child’s language skills at home? Here are some activities to help your kids improve their language skills!
Activities to work on your child’s language skills at home
Trying the activities and games described below will help your child develop verbal expression, quick thinking, concentration, social skills and other skills important to his or her development.
You are about to discover how to have a good time as a family, while developing your child’s skills!
The phone game
To start, all players sit in a circle on the floor. Make sure everyone can see each other’s faces.
One of the players must whisper a question to the person sitting to his right, who then whispers the answer back. That player must then ask the person to his right a question, who also whispers back his answer. This process continues until the circle is complete.
After everyone has had a turn, each player must say aloud the question posed to him and then give the answer he heard. The questions have nothing to do with the answers, of course, which can be very funny.
The backpack
Before starting this game, the participants must come up with a sequence. The first player says, “I’m going on a trip and I’m taking…” and finishes the sentence by naming an object. This can be, for example, an object such as “ball”.
Then the next player must repeat this sentence, but must remember the object said by the previous player and add a new object. As a result, the sentence gradually becomes more and more complicated. The game ends when one of the players can no longer remember the list of items.
Building a sentence
In this game, the players have to say different words – about four or five is enough. Then each player has to come up with and write a sentence or a short story that uses all these words.
Set a time limit (about two to three minutes) and, once the time is up, read all the sentences aloud. A person who does not play can play judge and decide which sentence is the best or the most original. Also, all participants could vote for who should be the winner. In addition, the winner can be determined based on speed. The participant who finishes writing the fastest is the winner.
Single letter sentences to work on language skills
In this game, one player calls a letter. Then set a stopwatch to one minute. During this minute , the participants have to make a sentence that contains as many words as possible starting with the chosen letter. For example, if you chose the letter ‘d’, this would be a good sentence: ‘Diederik dives off the diving board’.
Once the time is up, each participant has to read aloud the sentence they wrote down. Next, count the number of words in this sentence that begin with the letter you chose. The contestant who completes the sentence with the most words with this letter wins. This person may then choose the letter for the next round. You can play this game until you no longer feel like it.
As you have seen, there are several fun games that you can play with your children at home to improve their language skills. You just need to use your imagination and make time to play games with the family while your kids learn something. What are you waiting for?
