Welcome back for our second summer fun activity to support speech and language! If you missed the first post, be sure to check it out here!
Summer Fun Activity #2: Outdoor (or Indoor) Camping
Do you have a tent at home, along with a flashlight (you can also use your phone’s flashlight)? Those two things are pretty much all you need for this activity!
Materials Needed:
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Pillows
Flashlight
Goals to Target:
Play skills: This is a great activity to target symbolic play and pretend play! Symbolic play is when a child uses an object to represent another object (for example, using a banana to represent a cell phone). If you don’t have a tent at home, you can build a tent with two chairs and a blanket, and let that represent an actual tent! You can extend the play scenario by pretending to make a fire, pretending to make s’mores, or pretending to see different animals!
Vocabulary: If you’re doing this at night, you can turn down all the lights and get your flashlights out! Bring your child’s favorite books into the tent and read them together, shedding light on the book with your flashlight! Sounds silly, but this can make the reading experience more exciting! You can identify different objects, actions, or descriptive words in the book, have your child answer questions about what happened, or who is doing what, or what they think is going to happen next, or have them label the items or actions that they see! Here are some tips from the U.S. Department of Education about how you can help your child become a reader. You can also target vocabulary by having your child find different items around the house with your flashlight! You can make this into a game (if you have two flashlights accessible) and see who can find a particular item first.
Following instructions: Get your child involved in building the tent or teepee! You can say things like “Can you bring me the ____?” or “Put the blanket over the chairs.”
Come back next week for summer fun activity #3 and don't forget to subscribe for our month-long activity calendar!
