Today I've asked Liz from SpeechLadyLiz to share with you! She's working in a clinic so social skills for the preschool crowd is part of her every day!
I’ve been asked many times, “How do you work on pragmatics
with preschoolers?” It’s hard because
you can’t be as direct as you can be with older children. I work in a preschool and almost every single
one of the children I work with has a pragmatic goal. Along with that pragmatic goal there are
always play goals. So in my opinion, how
do you work on pragmatics with preschoolers….play, play, play. I recently had a conversation with another
SLP who works in the schools. She said
the last thing I have time for is working on play. Everyone around us was totally bored with our
conversation or otherwise I might have flipped the table over and said
“What???” Play with preschoolers is
probably the most important thing you can do.
What can you get from play you might ask? Narration, conversational
turn-taking, following directions, commenting, initiating, asking questions,
awareness, inhibition, attention and the list goes on and on. I have the luxury of getting to see my kids
for 4+ hours a week and 2 hours at a time, so I’m able to really bombard them
with language related to our theme. I
figured I’d give you all a rundown on how I work on play and pragmatics with a
specific theme.
Playing With Baby Dolls
During circle time I like to go over the vocabulary and have
each child repeat the vocabulary we are targeting that week. Preschoolers=visuals, so I have this visual(freebie!) below to talk about all the things we can do with the targeted
toy. I also bring the toy into circle
time and show them how to play with the toy properly.
Once we’ve practiced how to play with the toy in a more structured, facilitated environment, then we go to free play with the toy. I have seen a lot of carryover of the skills taught into these play sessions. The first time a child has a successful interaction with a peer and they see the importance of these interactions it's amazing! During the free play time I like it to be more controlled by me (I’m an SLP after all) and I do that by having a focused activity.
Bathe the baby
I usually grab our
sensory bins, some soap, a rubber ducky or two and a towel and let the kids go
at it with baby bath time. I
purposefully only have one baby doll to use so that they have to take turns and
work together to give the baby a bath.
This is also a wonderful opportunity to work on receptive language through
identification of body parts and following directions. Kids love to play with water plain and
simple, so I generally hear a lot of spontaneous language during these types of
activities.
Diapering the baby
Some additional activities that are fun to do are painting with baby bottles.
Put paint in a baby
bottle and then the kids can shake and squeeze to get the paint on the paper.
Make a sock baby.
All you need is a
sock, ribbon, stuffing and sharpies.
This is a great take-home so kids can take it home and parents can help
carryover those play skills at home.
Find those directions here.
Find those directions here.
What I’ve come to
learn is you can’t force friendships with children just like you can’t as an
adult. So to help children understand
the importance of friendships you have to create fun and engagement between
them. Pragmatics is one of the most
important aspects of our job as an SLP.
We want our children to be social butterflies and have friends and
successful social interactions. Play is
the way to get that start. It’s not only
a very important part of what we do, it’s an essential part of what we do. It’s also pretty fun and entertaining too.
Check out my “How To
Play With Cars” post here.
OH MY GOSH LIZ! If I overheard that conversation you had with your colleague, I might have had a coronary right then and there! Holy smokes, has someone missed the boat! Next time you can tell her/him that research shows that play facilitates: imaginative thinking and exploration, abstract thinking, problem solving and reasoning, life skills, leadership skills, communication development, social skills development, theory of mind, understanding of safety, self-confidence and a high self-esteem...AND some researchers theorize that play positively affects IQ as well! Play IS the child's WORK! And she will MOST definitely make more progress on her goals if she is "playing". It is NOT developmentally appropriate to expect a PK student to "sit" and participate in any structured academic (including language)activities for long periods of time. I completely agree with your strategy...you control the play by controlling the manipulatives and materials. But oh what language I suspect you hear! What problem solving! What reenactments of daily situations! ALL those goodies in one therapy session. In your colleagues defense, I really did struggle for years with trying to incorporate play into therapy as it was drilled in my head in grad school....data, data, data, get as many trials as you can...etc. But what a disservice that is when we are presenting situations that are developmentally inappropriate. I had to come to terms with qualitative data and with NOT having control over EVERY aspect of a therapy session. It isn't easy but after much time and working with other great professionals, I got there...and the progress I've seen does NOT compare to drill. Thanks so much for your post. It's great!
ReplyDeleteWow! I loved developing play. My preschoolers loved restaurant--customer and waiter with picture menus, and they loved being the speech teacher and "reading" their favorite story and telling the others what to do with the story pieces. I think they loved giving my stickers away too...:)
ReplyDeleteWhat a great post! Providing only one baby doll is a great way to facilitate interaction between the children. It's so functional for them too! Preschoolers are forever going after the same toy as their peers.
ReplyDeleteI think you make a great point too, Maria. We are always looking for that measurable piece during therapy. Although I don't get a percentage of success when working on play, I usually make tally marks each time the child initiates, reciprocates and comments and indicate the period of time play occurred. At least this gives me some point of comparison for the following session.
Mo Lo, I take date the same way. Ha! Great minds...! I feel at the very least it does give me some hard data for the number of times child exhibits those social skills vs. the number of opportunities. I've also become very good at taking qualitative data as well. This I found was a must in my early years as an SLP working with insurance companies and such. In the schools I became very good at using a quick system to note the level of assistance and types of cuing strategies a child requires to participate and perform some of these social skills. I found that very useful at IEP time to explain to parents the difference between NOT being able to perform a skill and being able to successfully do so with various types of cues. I'm sure everyone probably has their own way of doing this but I think if I hadn't needed to worry about insurance companies early on in my career I might never have thought of that. I'm not that smart. Ha!
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