Summer speech therapist tips 3 and 4

Tip #3 — enrich vocabulary and practice coherent speech

Every summer is a series of fresh impressions: excursions, meetings, travels. Use this period to expand your preschooler's active vocabulary.

Specialists from Neuro-Clinic give several recommendations:

• actively comment on everything that catches your eye: birds, plants, weather phenomena, landmarks. Explain the meaning of unfamiliar terms;
• practice retelling skills. After reading, ask the child to retell the plot in their own words or come up with stories based on illustrations. Encourage detailed answers with guiding questions;
• have a word auction: "What kind of berry?" (fragrant, rosy, small). Let them come up with as many descriptions as possible.

The more actively the child speaks and absorbs new phrases, the brighter and more expressive their native speech becomes.

Tip #4 — develop related skills

Correct diction and intonation expressiveness depend not only on tongue exercises. Breathing, mobility of the speech apparatus, and fine motor skills play a key role.

Here are some useful summer activities:

• fun articulation exercises. Use available foods: hold a berry with your lips while stretching out vowels, or place small berries on the tip of the tongue and toss them up;
• practice speech exhalation. Blow soap bubbles, blow fluff off dandelions, race paper boats in a basin, or blow a cotton ball off your palm;
• finger activities. Draw patterns in the sand, draw with chalk on asphalt, make mosaics from pebbles or pine cones, make sandcastles, sort beads and buttons;
• learn to navigate in space. Ask more often which object is on the left/right, above/below, in front/behind, or behind some obstacle.

Such short exercises will take only 5–10 minutes a day, but will significantly improve speech skills and overall coordination.