Have you joined our #dailychatchallenge yet? It’s not too late to join in. 5 days—5 activities and resources to support language development in your home.
Oral language is the foundation that all other learning stands on. Professor Pam Snow discusses the importance of building a firm oral language foundation in her article, Updating the Language (and literacy) House.
Language development may be biologically natural, but it is not “set and forget".
Daily explicit chat enables all children to learn about language through everyday activities. Back and forth conversation builds a firm foundation in your child’s brain for all future learning and development. As children get older conversation builds vocabulary and meaning. It can teach the subtle art of sentence structure, turn-taking and interruption. Children who have brilliant oral language skills are more likely to become successful, confident readers.
Today I am sharing Day 1 of the #dailychatchallenge – Doing the dishes
Tag #dailychatchallenge to join in!
Washing up is an activity that happens frequently in most homes, especially if you have several children. We always run out of cups! Does that happen to you? I’d get it if we had 5 cups—5 people, but we don’t, we have many.
Doing the dishes for a toddler or preschooler is water play
Looking at the bubbles
If you don’t have the time for your child to help, or you always use the dishwasher and never wash dishes by hand—you could choose a different time and set out a bowl of water, some bubbles and various kitchen items to play with.
Doing the dishes could be so much more than just clean plates
Each activity comes with a picture poster and a chart of language goals. Print out or use the resource from your device.
Start at the bottom of the chart and move up. Labelling something is much easier than putting it in a category or thinking about similarities or differences.
Work on other skills such as counting, shape and size as you label
Start with labelling and move up. Work on counting skills as you label—Let’s count the plates we need to wash today.
We have lots of spoons to wash. They are all different sizes; I wonder why? The little spoons are called teaspoons, the bigger spoons are called tablespoons, and the large round ones are soup spoons.
Work on inference skills with an I wonder question—I wonder why this plastic plate floats and the metal fork sinks? Don’t be surprised if your child doesn’t respond; wait for an answer and if one doesn’t come model one so your child knows what to do.
Scooping up water and letting it fall
My eldest often soaked the place and didn’t like wet sleeves so he always did the dishes like this. I look back on these times with fond memories. My kids are now 14, 11 and 10. I can see the benefit of encouraging teamwork from the beginning.
Of course, this didn’t happen every wash-up session
We used the dishwasher, and we didn’t always have the time to spend an hour on the dishes. My eldest loved doing the dishes when he was younger and would actively take part when he could. He loved playing in the water and would often wash the same dish many times. Now, it’s a different story and he would rather dry and put away!
They all help with chores. We don’t have a reward system or a roster—they are too hard to keep up with. We work on what I call The Little Red Hen theory; you live here, you consume, you must share the load! My youngest was the only one who would let me take a photo!
Vocabulary building
As kids get older we still need to label things, especially equipment they might not have seen before. Label everything for preschool children. When you name things you help your child understand the world around them. Babies are sponges and take it all in. Talk about an activity with your baby even though they are not at the talking stage, yet. As your child gets older help them label things. To begin with, your toddler might not even realise that a blue plate and a white plate are still called a plate. This is the type of explicit instruction that some children need. All flat dishes we eat off are called plates. It doesn’t matter what shape they are and if they are coloured or have a pattern—they are all plates.
Discuss synonyms—A cup can also be called a mug.
I tried out the figurative speech challenge with my own children and only Mr Middle got it right—This bowl can also be called a dish, ‘What does it mean if I call dad a dish?’
The responses
The youngest-Are you saying he is silly? Dishes don’t have a brain!
The middle one-Dishes hold delicious food, are you saying he is handsome?
The oldest-Dishes hold food are you saying he is supportive?
Extend the activity to washing other things
Water play is always a fun activity. The language hierarchy model can apply to washing teddies, dolls and playing in the water. We often wash soft toys. We live in Perth; the weather is conducive for water play most of the year. My youngest went through a phase last summer of continually washing her teddies. They even got a washing line! The boys joined in too—who doesn’t love to dip their hands in cold water on a hot day?
Here are some of the ways we chatted as we played
What did we do first, next and last? Get your child to sequence the activity and give you directions to wash a toy?
Association-What else might we need to make the soft toys clean?
Sort toys by size and category- We have all the large teddy bears here and a group of small animal over there.
Differences- What is different about a dry toy and a wet toy?
Join in here and tell us your favourite challenge, what did you learn about your child’s language from doing an activity?
We have now done 3 challenges and I now know that we need to work on figurative speech and analogies.