Have you ever wondered how to make language learning fun for your child?
It’s easier than you think! Language development is key to early childhood development. It helps children communicate, connect with others, and express themselves.
The best part? Encouraging language development doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, some of the best ways to support it are through everyday play and simple activities.
Below are language activities for preschoolers to help foster language skills. These activities are fun and practical, ranging from storytelling and puppet play to sensory activities and block play.
Let’s explore simple ways to build language skills through play and everyday interactions!
Language In Early Childhood
Language learning comes naturally, and children are born with all the necessary skills to develop their language skills. Therefore, as long as we expose children to language in early childhood, they will learn to speak.
Furthermore, we also know that they quickly absorb words for communication and language development early on. I am sure you recall when your toddler or preschooler repeated something you said, and you wished they hadn’t.
Even though language development in children begins at birth and occurs naturally, it does not mean that we, as parents, can not enrich their language learning and development environments.
Our role is to interact, listen, read, sing, talk, and play with them to build communication and language skills.
During play:
- encourage communication
- introduce new words
- make eye contact
- model language skills
- repeat words
- speak directly
- talk clearly
- use complete sentences
What a privilege and pleasure to play a role in your child’s language learning!
The Importance Of Language Development
Language development in early childhood is vital to a child’s social-emotional, brain, and cognitive development. Language and communication skills are essential developmental tasks that support overall growth in your child’s early years.
Our language skills determine how we communicate, relate to others, and experience life. Imagine a world without the ability to learn, express yourself, build relationships, or share your needs and wants. Admittedly, that is not what we want for our children.
Furthermore, as your child begins to watch, listen, and explore the world around them, they learn how to express their ideas and emotions.
Play And Language Development
Ah! Play, is it really that important to language development in preschoolers and toddlers? The answer is YES! If you have been around Discovery Building Sets much, you will see that we believe all children need more time to play (adults, too!)
So, how do you encourage language development in toddlers and preschoolers? Language development through play includes reading, singing, talking, playing games, and block play.
How to include language learning into daily play:
- Create a welcoming environment where language activities can occur naturally and where children can explore, play together, and play independently.
- Provide open-ended materials, like arts and crafts, playdough, pretend play, and block play area props. The larger the variety of materials offered increases the exploration opportunities. Just look around the house, and you will be amazed at what kids can use to play. Through play, your child can ask questions, increase vocabulary, and you can model language, boosting their language skills.
- Build on what interests your child. As an illustration, if your child is curious about penguins, read books about penguins. Talk and sing songs about them. Enjoy other activities like a field trip to the aquarium or zoo to see the penguins. Use these opportunities to develop language skills and increase their vocabulary all through play and exploration.
This is not a time for worksheets and memorization. Instead, let them wonder and ask questions. Then, together, find the answers.
What To Remember When Incorporating Language Activities For Preschoolers Into Play:
- Actively listen to your child.
- Talk, talk, and talk some more about what you are doing throughout the day. For example, “Let’s go have some breakfast. After breakfast, we can get dressed and go to the park.”
- Gently correct mistakes by repeating the sentence back with the proper word usage and pronunciation.
- Encourage and praise proper language and communication skills.
- Repeat new words to develop vocabulary.
- Ask open-ended questions that require more than one-word answers. Such as asking, “What are you doing?” will provide a more extended response than “Are you playing with your blocks?”
- Use follow-up questions for more details. For example, if your child said “blocks” to the above question, you could ask, “What are you building with your blocks?”
- Model more elaborate sentences and phrases. For instance, if your child answered “house,” you could respond with, “Oh, you are building a house with your blocks.” You could further the conversation by asking more questions, such as, “Why are you building a house?” or “Who will live in the house?”
- Keep screen time to a minimum. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends, “For children 2-5 years, limit screen use to one hour a day of high-quality programming and co-view with children.”
Language development activities for preschoolers should be natural, not forced. Remember, you are just having conversations!
Language Activities For Preschoolers
When deciding what language activities to provide for preschoolers, remember to focus on encouraging their verbal development. Create opportunities for group games that foster conversation.
Build language skills for preschoolers with listening activities. Try recording your child talking with you and play it back. They love to hear themselves!
Each of these preschool language development activities is simple, playful, and fun! While also building your child’s language and confidence.
Storytelling
Who doesn’t love a good story? Isn’t that really what going to the movies is all about? Storytelling is also one of the best language development activities for preschoolers. Several methods exist for creating storytelling activities, but they all follow the same principle: Encourage your child to tell or retell stories to get them talking.
Create A Story Basket Or Bag
Again, there are multiple ways to build a storytelling basket, bag, box, or bin. Ideally, you want to collect things from around the house based on a theme that will inspire a story. It can be any combination of loose parts and characters, either based on a book you are reading or not.
For example, you may have previously spent the day at the beach, and you want your child to tell a story about that day. You could include a small bottle of sand, shells, small pieces of fabric, paper umbrellas, tiny pretend food and small figurines.
Now open the top of the container and encourage your child to tell a story with the objects. You could create a little rhyme to use each time, like, “What story will we tell today?” “Open the top and see who has come to play!”
You may also want to have paper, crayons, markers, or colored pencils available to expand the story potential with a background or landscape.
Use Photos Or Wordless Picture Books
In this method, you use wordless picture books or photos to prompt storytelling. Try some of these variations based on your child’s language skills.
- If your child is not yet using their expressive language skills, you can have them point out items in the book or pictures as you tell the story. Connecting the story they hear with the photographs is helpful if your child is not yet talking.
- If your child has some expressive language ability, they can start by describing what they see in the photos or books. For example, “What is the character doing?”
- Finally, if your child has well-developed expressive language skills, you could ask them to describe not only “what the character is doing” but also “what they are thinking.”
Tell Your Child Stories
Create stories based on your child’s interests with characters, adventure, and a happily ever after ending. Make it playful, maybe something from your childhood, or entirely make-believe.
When our kids were small, we had a camping tradition. When it was time to quiet down for the night, Dad would tell them a story. They got to choose the subject, and he would make it up on the fly. Sometimes, they would chime in and build on the plot, but mostly, they just loved to listen.
Why not create a storytelling tradition of your own?
Block Play
Block play is an easy addition to your daily routine and fosters communication and early language development.
Have you ever noticed how the block play area is a magical place for toddlers and preschoolers?
When playing with wooden building blocks, your child learns new words to describe the blocks’ colors, shapes, and sizes. They might also name the parts of their fort or tower, such as the “window,” “door,” or “gate.”
Furthermore, block play inspires imaginative play, and this is where communication and language skills develop. Pretend or fantasy play invites dramatic adventures and storytelling.
Preschoolers love to narrate what they are doing. As their story develops, so do their language and communication skills.
Building with blocks also provides opportunities for social interaction. This is when children learn to interact with others, communicate, figure out how things work, collaborate, and work through their problems.
You can engage with your child during block activities by asking interesting questions about what they are building.
Building sets and blocks for toddlers are available in various materials, shapes, sizes, and colors. So, select one that is age-appropriate and sparks your child’s interests.
Music Activities
What child doesn’t love a good rhyming or silly song? They love to sing, dance, and move to the music. So, what better way than to develop language skills with music?
By memorizing and repeating the words, they build vocabulary and thereby build their language skills.
A win-win way to engage them is while driving in a car. Put on a favorite CD and together sing some silly songs and rhymes.
You might even make them forget the age-old question, “Are we there yet?”
Sing songs or rhymes like one of these:
- “Humpty Dumpty”
- “Old McDonald Had A Farm”
- “Wheels On The Bus”
- “Itsy Bitsy Spider”
- “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” (my niece’s favorite)
- “Row, Row Row Your Boat”
- “5 Little Monkeys Jumping On The Bed”
Engage in one of these musical circle games
- “Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush”
- “Ring Around The Rosie”
- “The Farmer In The Dell”
As a bonus, you can play along with instruments purchased or homemade (e.g., pots and pans with wooden spoons).
Arts & Crafts, Painting, And Playdough
These open-ended materials are wonderful for vocabulary-building and conversation-starting preschool language development activities. Children can describe what they are making or express their feelings about the picture they painted.
Language Development Games
Board, card, or outdoor games encourage social interaction and build vocabulary related to the game. Make sure the game is age-appropriate and that your child has the vocabulary necessary to enjoy playing it.
Describe Me Bags
This activity focuses on getting your child to describe things.
- You need some type of bag (cloth works well) to place the objects so they can not be seen.
- Next, collect everyday items from around the house, such as a crayon, a small magnetic wooden block, a spoon, and more. Place all the pieces into the bag.
- Lastly, your child is going to put their hand into the bag, feel one of the items without looking, and then describe it to you until you can guess what it is.
Sensory Play
Sensory activities are about getting your child to use all of their senses—while building receptive and expressive language skills. Look for items with various textures and sizes, like magnetic blocks, pasta, corks, pebbles, buttons, and so on. You can also use things like finger paint, shaving cream or dried beans, rice, or oats.
Activities for language development in preschoolers:
- Ask Questions – Such as, “What color is the square block?”
- Follow Directions – For instance, “Bang two blocks together.”
- Inference – For example, “If we mix red and yellow playdough, what will we get?”
- Expand Vocabulary (plurals, verbs, prepositions, and adjectives) – For instance, “Roll the yellow playdough into a ball and put it on top of the blue.”
Use their senses To Introduce New Vocabulary Words
- Sight – colorful, shiny, dull
- Smell – smelly, fishy, fruity
- Sound – loud, whisper, scratchy
- Taste – sweet, salty, sour
- Touch – bumpy, sticky, slimy
A sand play area is terrific for sensory activities or constructive play, including digging, building, and playing.
Receptive Language Activities
Receptive language skills are the ability to comprehend words, sentences, what is read, and what others say. Typically developed first, these skills are essential for successful communication. Without hearing and understanding language, it is difficult for a child to learn, express themselves, or build relationships.
Explore the receptive language activities for preschoolers to develop your child’s receptive language skills.
Play Every Day
Language learning should be fun! It is something that you can easily incorporate into your everyday play and activities. During play, it is simple to use and model position words such as “over,” “under,” “top,” or “bottom.” You can also use and model action words like “hopping,” “running,” “swinging,” or “jumping.”
Let your child lead, be creative, and encourage their imagination and creativity while playing.
“When we make PLAY the foundation of learning, we teach the WHOLE child.”
Vince Gowmon
Read, Read, And Read Some More!
Do you see a common theme here? It is never too early to begin reading to your child. Reading is crucial to their language development, including both receptive communication skills and expressive communication skills.
In this case, we are focusing on receptive language activities while reading:
- Expand their vocabulary by pointing to and labeling pictures in the book.
- Encourage them to find and identify things.
- Recap what is happening in the story.
- Ask questions about the main parts of the adventure to boost comprehension.
Furthermore, you can encourage a love of books by reading daily. Start simple with picture books and graduate to longer ones as the child’s language skills develop. Visit the library or bookstore for storytimes to foster a lifelong love of reading.
Puzzles
Puzzles are another fantastic way to focus on receptive language skills. The aim is to engage in conversation while putting together the puzzle. For example, have your preschooler or toddler find a specific piece. You can ask, “Find the duck.” and “What sound does the duck make?”
Keep the conversation going as long as your child is engaged and enjoying themselves! If the puzzle concerns animals on the farm, you can ask, “What else do you find on the farm?“
Scavenger Hunt
Scavenger hunts are brilliant for building language skills and gross motor development. Just think about all the running around and finding things that the kids do. What a blast!
However, to focus on language development, let’s create a list and hunt for the items. This activity is also easy to incorporate into other activities, such as cooking, painting, or gardening.
Let’s say you want to bake cookies. You create the list (including pictures) for your preschooler to “shop” for the items around the house.
Help them complete the list with questions or directions, such as “Where do we keep the butter?” or “You can find the flour in the pantry.”
Follow up by baking the cookies together, which further develops their expressive language skills.
Games That Stimulate Language Development
Activities and games that target active listening and following directions are perfect for receptive language development. These skills are vital to building effective communication.
Do you remember any of these classics?
- Simon Says
- Red Light, Green Light
- Follow The Leader
See this post on social activities for toddlers and preschoolers for more games and activities to build communication skills.
Expressive language activities
Expressive language skills are the ability to use gestures, words, sentences, and signs to express meaning to others. Therefore, the following expressive language activities for preschoolers support expressive language development.
When engaging your child’s expressive language skills through block play or activities, it helps to remember the following tips:
- Engage in conversation.
- Ask open-ended questions.
- Talk about what you are doing.
- Have your child narrate their actions.
- Use language to take turns, request items, and give instructions.
Read, Read, And Still Read More!
We previously discussed receptive language activities for preschoolers; however, here, we will focus on expressive language activities pertaining to reading.
Books are amazing! They provide so many ways to explore and develop language skills.
Read age-appropriate books and ask lots of open-ended questions that require them to respond with more than one word.
For instance, “How do you think the character is feeling?” “What do you think the dog will do next?” or “Tell me what is going on in this picture?” These questions will require your child to process the question and then use their words to express the answer.
Picture books are excellent for introducing younger toddlers to expressive language skills. In this case, your questions can be more direct, like “What color is this?” and “What is this?” These will be one-word answers that are age-appropriate.
You can help model language by expanding on your child’s responses and replying, “Yes, that is a whale. He is a blue whale.”
Select books that relate to your child’s interests. For example, looking at a book about the ocean presents various vocabulary words associated with the sea. Encourage your child to identify and name items in the pictures.
Imaginative Play
Pretend play, fantasy play, or imaginative play are like language development on steroids. During this time, children tend to focus and develop more complex, expressive language skills. There is so much language flying around that it is like being in the front-row seat of the theater.
We wrote a post on the benefits of imaginative play that you can read.
Pretend play is magical and requires your child’s creativity. Encourage your child to elaborate on their storytelling by asking questions such as, “Where should we go?” “Who would you like to come with us?” and “What shall we take with us?”
These open-ended questions help build the sequence of events and storyline, helping your child develop language skills and confidence.
Most importantly, be a part of the fantasy play and language learning experience.
“When children pretend, they’re using their imaginations to move beyond the bounds of reality.”
Fred Rogers
Use these ideas to boost your child’s imaginative play:
- Dress up and have a tea party.
- Set up a pretend kitchen and cook something delicious.
- Build a make-believe hospital and take care of their dolls or stuffed animals.
- Create a corner store and go “shopping.”
- Play “house,” “go to a party,” or “get married.”
- Assemble a racetrack for their cars.
- Construct a repair shop for their toy cars.
Additional ways to expand your symbolic play and language development:
Dress-Up Chest
Collect old shoes, hats, and accessories from garage sales, thrift stores, or party stores. Add former Halloween costumes after the event. Dressing up is such a fun way to increase their vocabulary and language skills.
Talk about “Who are we going to be?” “What are we going to wear?” and “Where will we go once we are dressed up?” Be part of the fun and dress up! We can’t repeat it too often; you need to engage in conversation and ask those questions.
Add A Telephone
Every toddler and preschooler should have a telephone in their play area. Even the quietest child will engage in conversation with a pretend phone.
Other Props
Adding props, such as dolls, cars, trains, toy animals, play food, and other household items, to your pretend play and block play areas can increase vocabulary and language opportunities.
Puppet Play
Puppets are a playful way to interact and create dialog. Children love playing with puppets and creating a show for the family. They can recreate a favorite story or ultimately make up a new one. The possibilities are endless.
Furthermore, puppets are a way for children to feel comfortable expressing themselves. Your child can speak through the puppet or even have a conversation between two puppets.
Cooking
Remember the scavenger hunt previously where you “shopped” for the cookie-baking items? Here is where you can continue that activity, focusing on expressive language development through the sequence of events. Or try making these fall treats.
In this activity, you both will describe the recipe ingredients and steps.
- Begin by looking over and reviewing the ingredients they collected.
- Read through the recipe, talking about each of the steps.
- Next, have them describe what you are doing or what they are doing, what you have done, and what they think will happen next.
- Continue the dialog throughout the process by asking them, “What do I need to do next?”
Whether you tell stories, sing, or build a repair shop with big building blocks, you want to get your kids engaged in conversation and using their language skills.
Simple but powerful things like puzzles, games, or pretend play increase your child’s language development.
Which language activities for preschoolers will you try next?