You love hearing the sounds of kids playing in those carefree, innocent worlds they create. Well, the world’s kids play not only leads to smiles and laughter, but they’re also crucial for helping kids develop, on almost every level. From fine-tuning motor skills to learning how to communicate more effectively, play is a huge developmental path forward.
This is a big reason why play is such an important part of the work the team at Celebrations Speech Group does to help kids with developmental language disorders, as well as speech and voice disorders.
The reality is that slightly more than 7% of kids between the ages of 3 and 17 in the United States have a speech, language, or voice disorder. As well, 1 in 14 kids in kindergarten has a developmental language disorder. (Please note that there’s plenty of crossover between these statistics, but our point is that kids are no strangers to speech and language issues.)
No matter the communication issue, there’s a good chance that organized and targeted play can help.
Under any circumstance, play offers incredible developmental benefits for kids, such as:
Not only can all of these lessons be learned through play, but kids can have fun doing it, too. As specialists in speech therapy, applied behavioral analysis, and occupational therapy, our team understands that promoting speech and language development in an engaging, fun environment is the best way to help kids learn.
The games we use during our speech and language therapies aren’t just random games; they're ones that we know yield great results in helping kids develop better communication skills, even for non-verbal kids.
Better still, our use of play during therapy is designed to take the focus off the issue at hand and to distract kids as they learn new language and speech skills.
For example, if a child stutters, we sing songs together to encourage more language fluency. Or, if a child is struggling to track and understand what’s being said to them (receptive language disorder), we can reframe it as play, which can make a big difference with focus and attention.
In other words, using speech and language exercises certainly has its place, but we’ve found that kids can lose interest fairly quickly. If we camouflage these exercises as play, success is more easily found.
Another benefit of using play to improve speech and language development is that “homework” is more fun, too. At home, you can continue much of the therapeutic work we do here, under the guise of play, to help your child further improve their communication skills.
If you have more questions about the role of play in speech and language development, please don’t hesitate to contact one of our offices in Brentwood, Stockton, or Elk Grove, California, to schedule a consultation.
