How Mr. Potato Head Help Children of All Abilities Talk | Speech Therapist Tips

Mr. Potato Head is one of the best toys that you can use at home to make your child talk. But some of the times you stare at this toy, you let your child play with it, and you're stuck about what to say, what to do. And most importantly, you can't make your child say the words that you want them to say. So in this video, I want to show you what I would do for Mystical Datahead, starting from very, very easy language goals all the way to hard ones. Okay. My name is Ming, a speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com we're an online platform that teaches par how to use speech therapy techniques at home. First thing that you would start off with is actually just teaching your child how to play with this thing and introducing the toy to them. Okay, so we have a lot of body parts here. We're going to start off with receptive language. Okay. So receptive language. We just want them to know that these body parts have a name. I would tell them that I And then put it in like that, right? I'll tell them hat like that and put it on like that. So you do it a few times. After you've finished the whole Mr. Potato Head, you can give it to your child and let them play with it. And by the time that they. They find it a little boring, you can hold their hands and say oopsies and drop it on the floor, and hopefully some of the parts has fallen off. If not, you can just do, like, scramble like that and make it all come off. After that, you can tell them, oh, no, can you help me fix it, please? And you can teach them the body parts one by one again. So what I would do is I would put the body parts on the table. Once you put it on the table, you can tell your child which one you want them to pick up. So you would say nos and you would help them and pick up this. Yes. No, see? No, like that. See, if they imitate right at this stage, and then you can let them fix it on themselves like that until it finishes. So what you're doing here is a few things. Number one, you're building the receptive language in terms of body parts, which is a very important aspect of the vocabulary. And second of all, you're building compliance is that they're listening to you about which parts to put first. All right? Because you're being fun and you're. Every time you reset the play routine where you put it together and you go oopsies and you scramble them up, they would have a Motivation to actually play with you. And number three is that you're actually helping them with some play skills here. So if you haven't introduced the toy properly about how to play it and fix it, then your child would have known how to use it at all. All right, so now that we have made this routine and taught them some receptive language goals with body parts, next part is that we keep on doing the same thing. Put it together, scramble, make some noises. You can tell them to get the body parts again. And this time you want to add some actions to see if they can flip, follow your actions or not. So for instance, when you say nose, this one nose. And then see if they can do it themselves. If not, you can help them a little bit. This helps them to imitate some of the gestures pointing to let them reference that these things. That this thing is a nose and you have a nose. If your child wants the eyes, once they grab it, you can say, oh, eyes like this, eyes. And you help them out slowly. They will know how to imitate your actions in order to get this eye, which is very important because all communication is, is by telling you something, is by showing you something in order to get what they want. Okay, so other than that, this is where I would also try to put on the hats. So like that, put on the hats and go like that and see if they can do it themselves. They'll show it to them if they can put it on. And then you can add a little more play routine to it and go. And then drop it. You have more sets of Mr. Potato Head. It would make more sense. So another imitation that you can do is to put on. Try to put on the glasses like that. And then you can give another one to them. And they would put it on like that. Actions for the body parts, ears, eyes, nose, mouth. After these, you want to try like putting on the hat and putting on the glasses as action imitation. Where I might have the blue hats. And I tell them, put it on. See, copy me. And then they put on a green hat, something like that. And after that, you can also teach them some imitation on the toy itself. For instance, if we put on the hat like this, say, oh, no, it's not on yet. Your turn, your turn to tap. And then they tap it and it goes all the way in. Now that your child knows how to play, knows to imitate you with actions in a fun way. And then we can go on to doing some sound imitation. So one of the best parts to do it is the ears and the hands. Because it's very hard for your child to actually push it in. Because it's very hard, right? So once they try, you can say, oh, let me help, let me help. Right? You go E, E, E, E. And then it goes in. Alright, one more. You put it here, they can't put it in. And you say, oh, I'll help. Hold your child's hand and you say E like that. Okay? So you have to repeat this over and over and over again until they can actually push the hand in. If you're pretending your Mr. Potato Head is falling down, you can say ah. And you can also do putting the hat on your head and then go. And full credit to another speech therapist that I also Learned from on YouTube channel. I'll link the description below. She actually goes ha, choo. Like that. And another one you can do is actually to spin the toy on the table. So you can actually spin it on your knee and you go woo. Like that. And that's pretty fun because once it drops, it basically shatters. So please adjust these words and sounds and actions according to your child's ability. Now we can go on to some words we can use. So for instance, now that we have the routine of making the hat fall off, making the glasses fall off, we can teach words like fall off. Fall off. A verb that I like to use when playing, playing with this particular toy is put. So you can teach them put, put, put. And that's all this. Mr. Potato Head can walk. Walk on table, fall. Similar to ah, when you're falling. Right. Other than that, you can also do take off, right? I would say off. Yeah, off, off and off. That you can also do no. So how do you do? No is like this. You take something really strange and you put it at the wrong place like this and you say no. Uh, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Once your child gets used to it and knows what's happening is when they do it themselves and they say no. Sometimes I see children, after I do it a few times, they put an ear here and they say ah, no, no, like that. And the obvious ones are the body parts. And you can teach them the words for it with the gestures that you taught before. So for instance, if they want the eyes, you say, oh, what do you want? Eyes. If they can't say it, use the gesture you taught to help cue that word back out. Okay. Eyes, Eyes. See. Good job. So we can do all the body parts. Eyes, nose, mouth, sh. Shoes or legs or feet or whatever you want. Hands and all the accessories that you have, you might have a microphone, mustache, tongue, where you can also teach the gesture of doing like that. You can teach anything, all the verbs, all the vocabs that you have inside the box. That's why we said you should buy more sets of Mr. Potato Heads so that you can both use it and you have more parts to share after that. You can target like two words. So for instance, you can go the color plus the body part that you have two different types of hands. You have a yellow hand and a white hand, right? Or you could actually use as adjective a wiggly hand and a big hand, right? Which one do you want? The wiggly hand or the big hand? And then they have to choose. Whereas if your child isn't at the stage where they can talk it, they can just choose by pointing. But if they're older and you want them to speak and teach adjectives, descriptive language, you can ask which one do you want? And if they say hand, both are hands. So they have to. They're obligated to actually describe a little bit more. So in this case, you can either teach them wiggly hand or yellow hand, big hand or white hand. So if your child is at a two word level, then you can teach blue hat, green hat, blue arm, red glasses, blue glasses, like that. And other than this kind of standard structure, you can also target a verb plus an object kind of sentence structure like put nose, put eyes, put hats. Once your child totally understands about how to make and fix Mr. Potato Head, you can take turns with your child. You can take this bowl and pass it to the next person so that the next person has the material to put on to the Mr. Potato Head. So you can actually ask who whose turn is might be Ming's turn or mommy's turn or the child's turn. So you can say, oh, Ming put. Ming's turn. Ming put. Okay, put's ear. Whose turn? Oh, Stephen's turn. Cool. Here we go. Stephen put Stephen puts green ear. Cool, green ear. For questions, you can do the choice questions we talked about where they have to describe a little more. And then you can also do yes nos. Right. When we talk about doing the silly stuff, you can also say, hey, is this glasses? No, it's a hand. If they say yes, then try to put it on like glasses. Like, see, you say glasses, right? Oh no, it doesn't say oh no. Oh, no. So you ask again and you say, no, it's not. It's an arm, right? Okay, it's an arm. It's a hand. You put it back you can ask what function questions like what's the eye for? For looking, for reading. So if you have a book, you can put it in front of of his eyes and sees he's reading a book. Or if you have ears, you can put your phone next to him and say, see? Hearing, talking on the phone. You need your ears to listen, to hear, right? If you have a mouth, then you can say, mouth is for singing, right? La la la la la. Or it might be, mouth is for eating. And you might have a toy food and you can eat nose. Nose is for sneezing. Shoes. Legs are for standing. See, if you don't have it, it rolls over. Oh no, it fell down. So you can teach what function? What's the eye for? What's the nose for? What's the mouth for? Make sure you have the props to actually teach those things. So other than the what function, you can also teach why. All right, Once you have actually taught all the functions of the body, you can actually play a game with your child like this. You can make the Mr. Potato Head while down the road, blah, blah blah, fall down. Aa, like that. And you can ask what happened? And the child will say, oh, if you fell down. And once you pick it up, your Mr. Potato Head might lose a part. In this case, it lost its feet. So you can ask, can Mr. Potato Head stand up? No. You can ask, why? Because it has no feet. And this is where you can change it up. Every time Mr. Potato Head falls down, every it becomes very funny, goes la la la la la. Oh no. And this time he loses his eyes. So you can ask, can Mr. Potato Head read this book? And they'll say, ah, no. Yeah. No. Why? Because he's got no eyes. See, can you help him out there like that? And then, yeah, I can. You can see again because he's got eyes, right? The next thing is you want to teach them the sequencing of something. This is where I like to use Mr. Potato Head as like a little YouTube project for my students. I would take photos of them putting the whole thing together. First picture should be a total empty Mr. Potato Head. I'll put a sequence of pictures I use for my clients down in the description box below. And what I usually do is I take a photo at each step. Like this is one step and then I put on the hands and another step, all right? Until it becomes a full on Mr. Potato Head. I will tell them that, hey, let's make an unboxing video on YouTube. All right, I'll film them and I'll teach them how to talk each of the ways. So they will have these visual cue cards that they can put into sequence. First, I'll put them in the description box, remember? And then they can tell me, oh, first get the Mr. Potato Head. And then put on the shoes. And then put on the white hands. And next put on the eyes. And next put the nose below the eyes and where you can target more words by doing that, and it's totally up to you. You can adjust according to your child's language ability. And with those cue cards, you can teach them to do it. And once you hit record, they can use those cue cards to help them actually make a whole YouTube video out. And they can watch it, and it's super rewarding. The next and last step that I would use Mr. Potato Head for is actually to make up a story. So let me give you a real quick version of a story that I would use. Okay? So I would always start off with one day. Mr. Potato Head was walking down the road. He didn't see a rock on the road, and he fell down. He tripped on it. He fell so hard that his hat fell off, and it blew away. Oh, no. Mr. Potato Head was very sad because he lost his hat. But thankfully, Mr. Cow saw it and took it back to Mr. Potato Head. He said, Here you go, Mr. Potato Head. Be careful next time. And the end. So you don't need to make it very difficult for your child. And make sure you use a lot of gestures, a lot of suspense to make it entertaining for your child. Okay? And then after that, you can either ask your child some questions or ask your child to retell the story so that he understands what's going on with this particular situation. Thank you for watching this video about how to use Mr. Potato Head to make your child talk. And if you have any questions, you can always put them down below. And if you want a full list of all the things that I recommend parents to get in the beginning of doing speech therapy activities at home, you can go to agentsofspeech.com checklist. Okay. For the teaching materials, it will be in the description box below as well. So I'll talk to you in the next one. This will be a video series about how I actually use the toys I recommend in the checklist. Okay? So I'll see you guys very soon. Goodbye.