I love autumn. There's fun celebrations, Halloween and Bonfire Night but it's also a season of beauty and change. It stimulates our senses –
Sight – those fabulous leaf colours, shiny brown round conkers, fallen acorns and pine cones, apples on trees, fat orange pumpkins in the shops, squirrels gathering food, darker evenings, misty mornings;
Sound: the sounds of apples and conkers crashing and thumping onto the ground; the rustle and snapping of twigs and leaves under foot, the chitter of squirrels.
Touch - the feel of smooth shiny conkers, small acorns and dry crispy leaves as well as those less appealing wet, soggy ones; the feel of the pumpkin – firm and round, yet so orange inside and as you dig deep, those wet, stringy bits with the slippery seeds.
Smell: of damp rotting leaves, juicy apples and blackberries; crumbles and pies cooking
Taste: tart or juicy blackberries,, crisp sweet apples, a smooth sweet butternut soup
It makes us want to do things: gather what we find, kick up leaves, jumping into piles of them.
When the senses are stimulated our language becomes richer. Take the conker: all the different shades of browns as it dries out – chestnut, dark brown, tan, mud like ….; the feel of it – smooth, hard and round or perhaps dry and shrivelled and wrinkled; the look of it - shiny and glossy or perhaps dull; the sound it makes as it crashes down from the tree or as you drop one on the ground or into water – plop, thump, thud; the actions you can do with it – throw, catch, collect, drop, smash, squash….
So how can you help your child learn words? Have fun with them! Explore them using a multisensory approach as described above.
At weekends you can go on a family walk or visit a playground or farm … see what you find on the way. Try collecting things for craft at home: you can paint leaves, stick them in pictures or cards, cover them with glitter or use them for leaf rubbings. Little acorn cups can become tea cups in a dolls’ house or part of a tea set. Conkers, acorns and leaves can cause all manner of traffic issues on railways or roads and be loads to put in the carriages. As you play with these natural materials talk about them thinking about each sense and the words that these evoke.
Get moving with words. Clap them out or stamp their syllables. Think of an action that goes with that words. Sing a song about that word. Try using it in sentences, who can think of the best or the silliest? Bury objects in the sandpit / dolls house / stations the train track visits and see what you ‘stumble’ across.
Take a descriptive word for the day – like shiny or muddy and see how many times you can use it throughout the day.
Read to your child: children’s books are a wonderful source of rich varied descriptive vocabulary and describing the pictures is just as important as reading the set words!
Ask your teacher about your child’s topics at pre school or school and chat with your child about it, sharing your own experiences and knowledge as well as what your child is learning.
All of this will really pay off ☺ Did you know that the average child learns 2000 - 3000 words a year? This equates to 6-8 words a day! Vocabulary (word knowledge and use) has a huge impact on how well your child will do both at school. Vocabulary level at age five has been found to be the single best predictor of whether a child brought up in poverty will escape poverty in adult life, (Jean Gross).
So have a go and if you have any questions, do get in touch.
Catherine
@Bedford Early Years Speech Therapy
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