Activities to Build Confidence in Your Preschooler

08/28/2012

Nothing is more exciting and scary than the lead up to the first day of school; classmates, a teacher, and for some, a whole day of learning. One way to help alleviate some of these transitional stresses and ensure kids have more confidence, is to keep learning at home. Jeanette Podolsky, Director of Speech Therapy Centers (www.speechtherapycentres.com) has some activity ideas to help your family feel confident heading to the classroom.

“By incorporating activities for listening and language expression into your daily routine, and creating a language-literacy rich environment, you can help ensure a smoother transitions at school,” says Jeanette.

Here are her tips.

Preschool Age:

Simon Says:

• This is a great game to sharpen your child’s listening skills. This game can help to improve verbal attention, following directions, language processing skills, and self-regulation. You can increase the difficulty level of the game based on your child’s skill level.

Reading Together:

• Set aside some time for shared book reading. Look through the book with your child and encourage them to tell you the story. Encourage your child to read the words if the book is at their reading level. Encourage them to use the pictures in the book to support their story narration. Ask them to predict what will happen next in the story.

Grocery Store Guessing Game:

• Make grocery shopping more fun while building language skills. Give your child clues for each item on your list. If you are buying lemons, you could say “We need a fruit.  It’s yellow.  It tastes sour.”  If your child has a hard time guessing, give them two choices “Is it a lemon or a banana?” This game works on language comprehension skills and reasoning skills.

Make a Photo Book:

• Whether you’ve just come back from a vacation or you’ve had your child’s first trip to the dentist, help them learn the important skill of retelling a story by making a personalized photo book.  The first step is to take pictures of your child during the event and then talk about what happened as you put them in order.  Then have your child tell someone else about what they did.  This will be an exciting and fun activity for your child, because for once, the book will be all about them!

Making the transition from the lazy, dog days of summer back to a new school year can be a challenge for both parents and children. Incorporating some of these activities into your daily routine can make these last few days leading up to the first day less of a scramble.

Jeanette Podolsky is a speech-language pathologist. Jeanette’s vision of providing speech-language therapy to clients, who might not receive services otherwise, was realized with the formation of The Speech Therapy Centres of Canada. Jeanette is the Clinical Director and founder and has put her vision into the heart of the company. The Speech Therapy Centres of Canada Provides services throughout Southern Ontario with the motto ‘We Believe in Your Voice.’