Ming from Agents of Speech shows three ways to help toddlers talk: use repetitive routines like "1, 2, 3, go" with bubbles to prompt words, play with toys like car slides to teach verbs, and follow what the child does while adding sounds and attention.
All right, so we're going to talk about some speech therapy techniques for toddlers. And the first things first is that the lowest hang fruit for toddlers is to create very fun routines. I'm not going to make any examples here because I haven't gotten any parent consent to use the videos for this particular video. But if you would go to agentsofspeech.com course, if you sign in there, we have a bunch of free courses of which we have gone. Parent consent to share videos in the private forum, but not on YouTube for now. Please understand that if you want to watch that, go there anyway, verbally tell you some fun routines and hopefully it will let you know and give you some ideas. Okay, so first of all, fun routine is like the very easy ones are, is like the ones we talk about inside of our channel. Using a car slide, we can go 1, 2, 3, go and let go of a car and go straight like that. And you can use 1, 2, 3, go with literally anything. 1, 2, 3, blow block bubbles, 1, 2, 3, let go with a filled up balloon with air. You can also 1, 2, 3, throw a ball or water balloon, whatever. The aim is to create something that creates anticipation. And you go, 1, 2, 3, go. And you keep on doing it, keep on doing it, keep on doing it, keep on doing it until you get a word out of your kit. So fun routines are good, but they're also very tiring and it requires a lot of thinking about how to make sure the kid is enjoying it. You can't really get your child to sit down to do this because they keep on running around and they're super excited and so on. So let's talk about the next thing, which is play based therapy with toys. So play based therapy, there's a whole spectrum of play based therapy. It goes from following the child to crawl around, go inside of those tunnels and go on a trampoline. Those are also considered play therapy. But for me, what has been working for us at Agents of Speech with Parents is to sit the kid down to teach them a play sequence. And this can be just a toy that has a centerpiece. So what I mean by centerpiece, if you look inside of our channel, we have videos about using talk about car slide. The car slide itself is a centerpiece, but you cannot play it without using tools that you can give the kid, right? So there's a centerpiece there. There's a few that we can talk about. First of all, we can use a car slide and then we can also use a vending machine. We can also use those cooking set things that has like a hot pot game where you put things in, you turn it on, it spins and it looks like it's bubbling. There's also a barbecue set that if you put it, you turn it on it just like that, which is very cool as well. And then what else? You can play any of these toys that have a center item and that you can distribute things to the kid. You can teach them a sequence of that. So you can go from just teaching them, give this one, put this one and then turn on. That's right. Give this one, put this one, turn on. You keep on doing that, you're teaching the verbs of each step and that's the play based therapy that we like to do. Then it is really up to you. And the last point I want to talk about this is a very short video, is that I want you to also know that a lot of the speech therapists out there are talking about how to follow child's lead. So I'm not going to tell you exactly what to do. But at the same time, following a child's lead is quite important when it comes to a toddler who isn't on the spectrum or doesn't have any specific disorders and so on. The reason why is because if you can create a good relationship with your kid, right? And you follow the kid's lead, given that they already have some play skills, so to speak, then it's pretty easy to start getting them to talk to you. And how you do it is you imitate their actions, right? You get down to the level you imitate how they play and you like double down and make it even more fun, right? And then they will start to have better joint attention because when you're doing something that is fun, they'll start looking. And when they're looking, they will start to like at least have attention on the actions that you're doing and therefore later on the sounds and the words that you're making, right? And then later on you add things of which a lot of professionals online talk about, which is like sound play and stuff. So for instance, if there's an ambulance, you make the sounds of the ambulance, like be boo, B, so on. And on top of that you keep on making these silly strange noises as you're playing and following the lead and whilst adding elements to the play yourself and obvious, this is a huge topic and it requires a whole lecture. So I'm not going to do that here and I want to give you more examples. So before we go. I want you to go to agents of Speech.com course to go in, sign in with your email. And then we have courses in there from teaching your child from zero words all the way to sentences. And we're adding more every month. So the examples inside of there and you can watch there. All right, so that's it for this video. I'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye.
