HERE ARE SOME IDEAS OF TOYS AND GAMES TO HELP YOU TEACH NEW WORDS TO YOUR CHILD

What toys should I buy to help my child speak better? Fun games really do help your child's speech. Below please find a comprehensive list you can take shopping. These are used by the top speech pathologists in treatment sessions with young children and are designed to maximise talking and interaction.

If your child has trouble saying words then playing together with a variety of toys and having fun has a huge impact on children’s communication. Parents play with their child and talk about all the different toys as they play.

You can pretend to be having a birthday party for the child or the child’s teddy bear. You can make the toys talk, for example, “The cow is saying ‘Hello there, how are you today, Mr Horse’”. Use the toys to teach speech sounds, for example, if you are teaching the ‘K’ sound (as in ‘Kangaroo’) then you can play with toys with the same sound like ‘cake’, or ‘cow’ toys. The most important thing is to have fun:

Please feel free to print out your TOY TIME SHOPPING LIST

• Balls
• Birthday cake sets (wooden or plastic)
• Blocks and stacking cups
• Books
• Bottles of bubbles with wand that dips into the bottle
• Cars, trucks, boats and trains
• Castle sets
• Cooking sets
• Doctor’s sets
• Doll with variety of clothes
• Dolls house with furniture and dolls
• Dress up clothes
• Farm animals and fence and/or farmhouse
• Musical instruments
• Plastic fishing poles with magnets on the end, for catching magnetic fish
• Plastic food with utensils for serving
• Play-doh
• Supermarket sets with cash register, foods and plastic money
• Tea sets for tea parties
• Tool sets and things to pretend to work on or build
• Wooden puzzles with animals, transport, shapes, colours