Dear PEARLS Families,

Hope you are all staying safe and healthy! During school closures, I will be available Monday- Friday between the hours of 10:00 am and 1:30pm via email at SSassone@yonkerspublicschools.org. Please contact me to if you have any questions or concerns, and to receive speech and language materials for your child if you did not yet receive a hard copy.

All the best,

Mrs. Sabrina Sassone

Speech- Language Pathologist

Below I have shared some helpful resources and websites to help facilitate language at home:

Language Expansion Techniques for Parents to Use At Home: https://www.speechbuddy.com/blog/speech-therapy-techniques/language-expansion-techniques-for-parents-to-use-at-home/ 

Parents are the best teachers of language. They have the most opportunities to impact a child’s language development. At-home speech therapy should include several important language expansion techniques that parents and other communication partners should use. While it might feel or sound silly, communication partners should talk aloud to young children, nearly narrating events and actions, even though the child might not respond.  Some tips and techniques include:

Self Talk

Self talk is a technique where a communication partner should describe, in a narrative fashion, their actions or the things they see, feel and experience. For example, “I am pushing the train, choo choo” or “I see a big blue car, he car is driving fast” or “You need to get dressed, first I’ll get a shirt, then we need to find some pants.”

 Parallel talk

Parallel talk involves describing the actions of the child while they are playing or otherwise carrying on. Again, it might sound silly because you are at times talking without expecting to carry on a conversation, but it’s important to map language concepts onto the child’s action so they can learn the meaning of those words. For example, “you are pushing the train, wow you are pushing it fast” or “you are so happy, I can see you smiling.”

 Expansion

 Language expansion is a way of re-wording a child’s utterance, which may be incomplete or short, into a complete sentence. For example, if the child says “baby cryin” you might say use language expansion to say, “A baby is crying.”

 Scaffolding

Scaffolding is a bit similar to the above. Adults always want to challenge and teach the child by adding a bit more information. That is how children learn. Think of the phrase you heard a child say, and try to “one up” them by expanding the utterance ever so slightly. You can do this by adding a descriptor or verb, for example. If the child says,  “truck” an adult could use expansion to say “big truck,” or “that’s a fast truck.” Children need models of new words so try to add a new word to their original sentence.

Where and When to use Language Expansion

There are many opportunities to use language throughout the day. While riding in the car, use self talk to describe things out the window, what you might see or what people are doing. At the dinner table, expand a child’s utterances or use scaffolding to a add more vocabulary (e.g., “hot noodles”). During book reading, encourage the child to point to and describe pictures on the pages and use expansion and scaffolding to expand  utterances. And finally, during play with your child, use parallel talk while the child is pretending, stacking blocks, blowing bubbles or racing cars. You need not do it every minute of the day but to keep it in might often.

https://www.superduperinc.com/handouts/pdf/607_CraftingBeautifulSpeech.pdf

https://www.superduperinc.com/handouts/pdf/582_BasicConceptsScavengerHunt.pdf

https://www.superduperinc.com/handouts/pdf/576_NoPrepTherapyMayFlowers.pdf

https://www.superduperinc.com/handouts/pdf/559_Motivation.pdf

https://www.superduperinc.com/handouts/pdf/320_Practice_Main_Idea_at_Home.pdf