Some are general activities that should be done regularly, such as reading, and others are ideas of specific games to play.
1. Read
Read to your child every, single day if possible. Use different tones, voices and speeds as you read.
Don’t forget about nonsense rhymes and books that focus on rhyme. Every child should grow up listening to Dr Seuss books to train their ears to hear different sounds.
2. Talk
Talk to your child every opportunity you get, asking him questions and encouraging him to respond.
3. Nursery Rhymes
Sing nursery rhymes, action rhymes and finger rhymes. Rhymes are not just fun, but an essential pre-reading activity because they develop phonological awareness in young children.
4. Music
Expose your child to a wide variety of music – children’s songs, theatre, current popular music, musicals, etc.
5. Instruments
Teach your child about different instruments and play with them often. Improvise by making cymbals with pot lids, drums with boxes, shakers with toilet rolls and rice, etc.
6. Musical Statues
Play music and pause it every now and then. Your child must dance to the music and freeze like a statue every time the music stops. A variation is musical chairs – when the music stops your child must run quickly and sit on a chair.
7. Sounds
Teach your child the sounds that animals and objects make (e.g. birds, mammals, a vacuum cleaner, a car etc).
Then, play a game where you take turns taking out a picture of an animal or object from a bag. Without showing the picture, make the sound and the other must guess what object or animal it is.
Play this game with real objects too. One of you closes your eyes and listens while the other makes household sounds such as shutting a door, switching on the blender, sweeping, etc.
8. Listening Walk
Go on a listening walk in the garden, the park or around the neighbourhood. Identify all the sounds you hear, whether natural or man-made, such as wind, leaves crunching, chirping, cars on the motorway, an airplane, etc.
9. Recorded Sounds
Record sounds around the house, in nature or even animal sounds if you can catch your pets in time. Play the recording and see how many sounds your child can identify. This is easy to do now that most cellular phones have a recording function.
10. Glass Jars
Fill glass jars with different amounts of water. Tap them with a spoon and arrange them from the lowest to the highest sound.
11. Voices
Play this game when other family members or friends are around. Ask your child to close his eyes. Then, someone says a sentence and your child must guess whose voice it is.
12. Body Sounds
Think of ways to make sounds with your bodies, such as clapping, clicking, tapping or yawning. Then, one of you closes your eyes and guesses what body sound the other is making.
13. Sound Jars
Find at least 6 jars or tins that you cannot see inside and fill matching pairs with the same materials (e.g. 2 with beans. 2 with lentils, 2 with macaroni). Get your child to shake the tins and place the matching pairs together.
14. Listen for the Word
While reading a story, choose a word and ask your child to clap each time he hears the word (e.g. read Little Red Riding Hood and ask him to clap every time he hears the word wolf).
15. Body Rhymes
Teach rhyming by pointing to a body part and saying a word that rhymes with it, instead of the correct word. Ask your child for the rhyming word that is correct. (e.g. point to your eye and say sky, point to your ear and say dear, point to your hand and say land etc).
16. Do They Sound the Same?
Say pairs of similar sounding, or identical sounding words and ask your child if they are the same or different (e.g. say bear and beer, chair and share, pat and pat, put and pit etc).
17. Do They Rhyme?
Say pairs of words and ask if they rhyme (e.g house and mouse, pat and cat, lap and lip etc)
18. Chain of Rhyming Words
Make a chain of words with your child by choosing a simple word such as cat and taking turns adding a word that rhymes with it (e.g. cat, sat, pat, mat, fat etc). See how many words you can add to the list then pick a new word and play the game again.
19. I Spy With My Little Eye
Play this popular game by choosing an object in the room and saying “I spy with my little eye something that starts with b”. Begin with easier consonants and move onto vowels later. Use the sound at first, not the letter name (e.g. say “ssss”, not “letter s”).
20. String of Words
Say a string of words to your child and ask him to repeat them back to you in order. With a young child, start with just three words, then move onto four, five and six as he gets better at memorizing them in order.
Also, begin with related words to make it easier to remember (pizza, ham, mushroom) and later switch to unrelated words (glass, book, song).
21. Clap Your Name
Teach syllables by clapping to your and your child’s name together (e.g. Ma-ry-anne, Su-zie). You are clapping on each sound, not each letter! Call them beats to make it easier to understand.
Then, introduce common words and clap the syllables together. Start with one syllable (bed, door), then two (ke-ttle, mon-key), all the way up to 5 (con-gra-tu-la-tions, re-fri-ge-ra-tor).
22. What Word Is It?
Teach your child to put sounds together with this game.
Break words up by splitting them into the beginning sound and final sound. Say, for example, “It starts with b and ends with ed. Put it together and it says ….?” Start with simple words and make them more difficult as you go.
Then, switch over and separate the end sound – “It starts with trai and ends with n. Put it together and it says…?”
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