! No matter how busy our Emergency Department is, the most seriously ill and injured patients will always be seen immediately.

Language

Language

If a child’s language is assessed by a Speech and Language Therapist, there are two areas that will be explored; receptive and expressive language.

Receptive language refers to the language someone can understand.

Some children and young people have difficulties understanding certain vocabulary, concepts and instructions. This can include difficulties learning new vocabulary too.

Expressive Language refers to the language someone can use.

Some children and young people have difficulties using vocabulary in the correct context, formulating sentences using appropriate grammatical structures and sequencing events. A child/young person may present with difficulties in one or both of these areas.

Some children are diagnosed with Developmental Language Disorder; vocabulary or word finding difficulties; or may have language difficulties alongside another diagnosis such as Autism or speech difficulties.

If your child is diagnosed with any language difficulties, their Speech and Language Therapist will provide further, more specific intervention for the particular areas.

How to work on Describing Words (adjectives)

  1. Feely Bag- Put some things in a bag/pillow case. The child puts their hand in the bag and describes how the object feels, eg “It’s soft. It’s squashy”.
  2. Collect some pictures of everyday objects. Put out four or six pictures and take turns with your child to describe one of the pictures. The aim is to guess the right picture from the description, eg “it’s furry. It’s soft. It’s got whiskers”.

How to work on Position Words (prepositions) for example, ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘under’, ‘behind’, ‘in front of’

  1. These can be encouraged by playing hide and seek games, either with people or objects.
  2. Collect together some objects, a bag and a box. Take turns to give each other instructions. Fo example, “Put the cup UNDER the box”, “Put the pencil ON TOP of the box”, “Put the book IN the bag”.
  3. You can also do it around the house / in the park… anywhere!

There are also lots of board games in the shops that can be used to target and develop language skills

  • Guess Who
  • Headbandz
  • Dobble

Most games that involve talking can be used to target particular language concepts!

External Resources

Skip to content