Ming shows how to set up a therapy corner at home and use structured activities to encourage longer speech. Hide toys in containers so your three-year-old must ask for them, then gently prompt for more specific words like verbs and objects instead of jumping in to help.
Hey, welcome back to this video series of how to do speech therapy at home. In this video, we'll be talking about how to do speech therapy for children who are around three years old. Okay, so around three years old, as we were discussing before in previous videos. By the way, you better check those out first or else it wouldn't make sense for you right now. So three years old, we have to make them sit down already. Because the rationale is they're gonna go to school anyways and they're gonna sit on chairs, so why not teach them to do so? So what I like to do, as I told you before, you know, what tables to buy, what chairs to buy already, and what to do, make sure that their feet is on the ground. And then what you wanna do is to set up a corner, as I told you. And the problem is actually bringing them to the chair. So how do you do that? What I love to do is actually to use food and snacks for that or bubbles for that. So what you wanna do is you wanna tap on the chair and say, sit down, come on. And you want to push them from behind the shoulders. Da, da, da, da, da. Get them to the chair, sit them down, and then let them play something they love. So that when you tell them to sit down, you reinforce them. You give them something great, you praise them, and they know that, oh, this is great for me, this is the right behavior. Sitting down is nice. Once you get them to sit down, we will go back to requesting. As we were talking about, when you're requesting, it could be still bubbles. Make sure don't play too much of it, or else the next month, you have to buy a lot more toys. All right? If you are using things other than snacks and bubbles, you want to introduce toys, that's still fine. You can also still put it. Put the toys inside here. What I love to use is puzzles. So if your child likes a particular category of stuff, like transportation, animals, that kind of stuff, you can get that kind of puzzle. After that, put the puzzle pieces inside this container. And then every time, they will have to request for it. So you can say. If your child can already talk in one word or two words, they can say, mommy, open, or like, open the box. Okay, take it out. And then they can say like, oh, give me the car, car puzzle, or give me A or give me B or something like that. So there's a routine. The routine is they finish the puzzle, they ask for more. I open it, I give it to them, I keep on doing it right? And this Is a very structured task that is very easy to follow. And the trick to doing this stuff is not to talk too much and help too much. Kids who are speech and language delayed, they use their eyes a lot. If you watch my videos before, you would know. They use their eyes to track and understand the world around them. So if you present to them, ta da. Inside is all puzzles. Let's say they want it, they will try to open it. And when they try to open it, they will remember that you taught open before. And when they say open, you will do it. Okay, so what if your child, your three year is already speaking in one to two words? So open isn't enough according to their ability. What I like to do, and some therapists are different, some techniques are different. The reason why they need to speak longer is because they have to be more specific. So if they tell me open, I can do two things. Number one, when they say open. Oh, open. Okay, you can open. I hand it to them. And they have to be specific. Who's going to open? They might say ming open or mommy open or daddy open. Doesn't matter as long as it's specific. They said open, right? Okay, sure. Here we go. Jack, you open it. So, and then they need to think, oh no, it's breaking a pattern. Am I saying something wrong? Their language creates confusion. They have to clarify. That's the perfect, most natural way to make sentences longer. All right, that's one way you can add a subject. You can add also an object. That's why I like to teach verbs, because it's right in the middle of a sentence. So let's say that he says open and you say, oh, I don't understand. Open. What? Open the bag. You might have a bag around. Open my hands. What? Open my eyes like that. And then they're gonna be like, no mom, no dad, the box. And then you can teach, oh, you want me to open the box? And then you can teach them to say open box. That's how you make sentences longer. This is how you expand their sentence length while still doing something called requesting very elementary, structured tasks that you can do at home. If you found this video helpful, then please, if you haven't again, just go to agentsofspeech.com checklist to download a list of items that I tell my clients to get when they start therapy at home. Alright, thank you for watching. And in the next video we'll be talking about therapy for four to five year old children and maybe up to six onwards. Okay, so I'll see you in the next video soon. Bye.
