|  | Family Health | Toddlers Health

Games for Oral Language Assessment & Development

Normally, children develop speech following a fairly predictable pattern that correlates to their cognitive and muscular development. If a child is slow to follow this pattern, the child may have a learning disability or physical issue that is hindering oral language development. In these cases, speech therapists use games to find out how severe the language impairment is, what specific phonological skills are impacted and monitor therapy-based improvements.

  1. Chipper Chat

    • Chipper Chat is a set of magnet-based games offered by Super Duper Publications. A Chipper Chat game set includes 60 separate game boards and offers five games for every phonological skill. With these games, a therapist, parent/guardian or teacher produces oral sounds or tasks for the child. The child listens to whatever sounds or tasks are produced, and if they produce the sound correctly or complete the task properly, they are awarded magnetic chips. The games monitor basic areas of oral development and language such as syllable blending and phoneme manipulation.

    Smart Chute

    • Smart Chute is a game available from Didax Educational Resources. Although the system works with other areas such as math, a phonology-based version of the game is available. The basic component of the game is a plastic tower. The child inserts a phonology card into this chute--each of the cards have a language question on it for the child to answer or a task to complete. When the child says the answer or completes the language task, the tower flips the card to reveal the answer, so the game is self-correcting. The chute is designed to aid with memory recall.

    Pantomime

    • In pantomime games, teachers, parents/caregivers or therapists give visual and auditory cues to the child that convey some kind of emotion, action or feeling. The child then imitates or reproduces the cues. For example, the instructor could smile broadly and say "Happy!" and get the child to make the same face and say "Happy!" Another example would be an instructor using a toy phone to make a "call" and saying "Hello?" so the child learns an appropriate language response for when someone gets a call and understands how the phone is used socially for communication. Children naturally pantomime, but in speech/language therapy, the pantomime is geared toward specific areas of weakness. For example, if a child has trouble saying the "ch" sound, the instructor could get out a toy train set, say "Chug-a chug-a chug-a chug-a chug-a CHOO CHOO!" and have the child try to copy the actions and sounds. In most cases, the children have so much fun trying these activities that they don't realize they're in therapy. They simply see the guided pantomime as play.

Toddlers Health - Related Articles