Probably the guaranteed-number-one item in every paediatric speech therapist’s bag… a pot of bubbles! Bubbles are a great item for grabbing attention and modelling some simple, motivating vocabulary. There’s lots of reasons why bubbles are useful for encouraging communication and there’s a few simple tweaks you can make to really seize those opportunities. Find out more in this video…
- Hold the pot right by your face, so that your child can easily see what you’re doing with your face, whilst they pay attention to the bubbles.
- Put the lid back on the pot after every bubble blow. This gives you more opportunities to model ‘more’, ‘again’ and ‘open’ as your child returns for another blow of bubbles.
- Think about what other useful action words you can model, such as ‘blow’ ‘pop’ ‘pull [out the wand]’
- We can start to introduce some simple descriptive vocabulary, such as ‘big’ or ‘small’ bubbles
- We can model some early speech sounds with bubbles, including ‘p’ and ‘b’, ‘h’ and ‘w’
If your child loves bubbles, they probably love sandcastles too. Check out this post for some ways that you can use sandcastles to build attention and vocabulary.