A short tutorial by Ming @ Agents of Speech on teaching language to a developmentally delayed child using structured play. The speaker demonstrates using an age-appropriate toy (a piggy bank) to elicit single-syllable words, emphasizes rewarding attempts, and frames the activity as a language-learning task rather than a speech drill.
So structured play. We don't always have to get a child to sit across us with a flashcard. In fact, what we can do is to take a piggy bank, whatever toy is age appropriate. You can take a look here. Open. Just open. Good girl. Open. The mother just asked her to say open, of which she did, but, like, the sound is a little bit low here, so bear with me. So for every action, she's saying the word, but she's not pushing her to say. She's saying out, take, out. Right? Because this child in particular cannot do more than one syllable, so we're targeting only the word close. She tried to say it. Usually we tell parents, hey, you gotta reward and praise her. Say nice thing. Close. We're not doing a speech task here. We're teaching her to use the right words at the right time. And that's more of a language task. And here it's more of play situation, a structured way for. For every action, I would reward her for saying, ow. Whatever that was. I can be a little more generous, and I'll take that as a win.
