Home chores are the easiest and highly valuable moments to promote and develops vocational and speech and language skills.
Children naturally gravitate towards wanting to "help". We used lots of words; watering can, water, slow, pour, on the dirt, be careful, plant, thirsty, hot, day, more water, help, etc.Basic meal times have traditionally been the main time for families to unite.
But recently surveys have shown that less than half the families actually prep together or sit down and eat together.
ASHA Leader Magazine recently wrote; "SLPs can target many speech and language goals associated with food preparation. Useful skills learned by the child include:"
Take a minute and think about these skills and see how valuable they are for so many areas in life.
- Sequencing
- Literacy
- Expanding vocabulary
- Articulation
- Describing and commenting
- Actions
- Answering “wh” questions
- Problem solving
- Turn taking
- Recalling information