Building Vocabulary in Speech Therapy

I had a fun session yesterday where we were working on building vocabulary and making connections between words. Sometimes kids struggle to add new words to their vocabulary or have a limited vocabulary and this is something we can work on in speech therapy sessions. Does your child use a lot of non specific language such as "that thing" or calling everything "it"? This could mean that your child is struggling to add new words to their vocabulary. In speech therapy, we can work on teaching their brain how words are connected to help them build new language pathways. We can work on categories and moving items into categories to see how words and part of language go together. We can work describing items to help build up these pathways so that when they can't think of the word, they can describe what it is they are thinking of. We call this semantic feature analysis and use questions such as where do we find it, what does it look like and what group does it belong to. This helps us to strengthen the language pathways in the brain and help your child learn new vocabulary items. Yesterday, as we worked on describing items and pictures in our session, we decided to build a story with the pictures that we had. This was so fun and my client loved it, it really helped them to see how the items could go together. We could also work on expanding their language and adding more details to their story. A lot of the time, kids who struggle with vocabulary will also have difficulty telling stories, this way we can work on both at the same time. Try incorporating creating stories into play with toys or pictures at home and see if your child can come up with new ways that things go together.