Opportunities for communication

Speech and language therapy

﻿Hello everyone, my name's Emma and welcome to today's lesson. I'm looking forward to today's session and I hope you are too. I can't wait to get started, but before we do, just a quick reminder, we here at Oak are here to support any approaches you might already be using and any work you might have already been set. We know this lesson is going out to so many different children and families. So if you're not sure or have any questions, please do contact your child's school or usual speech and language therapy team. In today's session, we're going to be talking about communication. I'm going to be sharing some ideas to help you think about your communication at home. I'm going to be sharing some hints and tips for activities to help you communicate. And I'm also going to be giving adults lots of guidance on how they can help you to use your communication in your everyday activities. So for today's session, you'll just need some toys. Adults, you'll need some writing equipment and the downloadable resource that's available on the website with this lesson. So before we begin, find a quiet place where you won't be disturbed for the lesson. Turn off any distractions or notifications that you might have running on the device that you're using and make sure that you and your adult are seated comfortably. So let's begin by doing some talking and thinking about opportunities for communication. Communication is an exchange of information between people. Here I've written the most common reasons that people communicate. They communicate to request, reject something, say they don't want it, share enjoyment, give opinions, as well as things like to question, to comment and make decisions. Making choices is an important early step in the development of communication and using language. There are lots of ways that we can support children to begin to use language to communicate and make choices in their everyday activities. So pause the video here to think about your child's everyday routines. Which of these routines might be able to offer some choosing in them. When you've had a few moments to write down some ideas, press play to continue. So here I've put a few more ideas. You may have some of these but you're welcome to take some of my ideas as well and incorporate them into what you've come up with. I've organised them into morning, daytime, and evening activities to help us kind of organise our thoughts. So, morning activities that could offer the child an element of choice, things like breakfast and snack time, hygiene and clothes, play and other general activities, as well as things as movement and position of body. Similarly, I've put daytime activities could include lunch, snacks, places to go, other activities and more movement and positioning. And then in the evening, things like dinner, bath or shower, products use in hygiene, and then story or music before the child goes to sleep. All of these activities we could think about offering our child some choice within. Let's first have some practise offering our child choices in play. Children, it's time for five minutes play. Adults, during this play, offer the child a choice of something that they usually really enjoy and something that they wouldn't be interested in. For example, you might want to include bubbles as your high-interest toy and speeding because it's not really of much interest. Use real objects at this points. Children, you need to choose what you want. You could use your hands to reach for what you want, hold it, and show the adult with your eyes and face. When you've had a couple of tries with some choosing through play, come back to the video and press play to continue. Okay adults, just take a moment to pause the video here and think about how your child was able to show their choice. We can encourage children to make choices by using their senses to explore objects and the choices available to them. It's important that we give the children lots of opportunity and reasons to communicate throughout the day to day activities and find as many opportunities for choosing as possible. You can use observations of your child to help follow their lead and build an understanding of their likes and interests, into the choices that you offer them. As ever, persevering with positivity is key. We need to allow the children plenty of time to organise a response to the choices being offered to them and make sure that whenever they're making a choice and communicating with us, they get lots of positive feedback and reinforcement. When we're presenting choices to our children, we can use multisensory strategies to make this really accessible. Making choices doesn't have to be about using language and words. Making choices can be non-verbal as well. So we can present choices in object form, picture form, symbol form, whatever is most appropriate for our child and their level of development and understanding. And we can make sure that when we're presenting choices we're using closed questions. Do you want x or y rather than what do you want to drink? That's a very open question. Whenever we're working consciously on choosing, we need to make sure we are in an environment where there aren't too many distractions so the child can really focus on the decision ahead of them. And when we first start, we need to be limiting it to two choices, one favourites, and one clearly not a favourite so that the choices is quite narrow and structured for the child. But gradually we can work towards adding more objects or alternatives so that the child has a wider scope of choice that they can make. So pause the video here to take the opportunity to make some visual symbols or gather some objects for one of the daily activities that you have written down that you would like to be able to offer your child some choice within. You could draw some pictures or gather the objects as I said. For example, you could have different objects for snack choices that the child could choose from at their snack time. There are lots of ways that we can incorporate choice into everyday activities. Today we've been working on choosing between two things, but you can also work on choosing within activity. You can also work towards your child having the choice to say no to an activity. You can then build in the element of choosing who, where, when and finish, but all of these choices we need to remember the same strategies, that any choice presenting should be multi-sensory and appropriate to our child's level of understanding and development. So pause the video here to create some multi-sensory resources to reinforce your child's ability to make a choice in another day-to-day activity. When you've had some time working on this resource, come back to the video and press play, and we'll finish up the lesson. Well, that's all for today but thank you so much for all your hard work on choosing. It's been great that you've been able to communicate your choices with your adults at home. Adults, if you would like to write down a few things that you've learned today, that would be great. Children, if you'd like, you could ask your parent or carer to write down some of the fantastic choices that you've been making in your using language diary and share this with your teacher at school so that they can see the progress that you're making. You could even ask your parent or carer to share this with @OakNational on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram so I can see your progress too. Well, all that's left for me to say is thank you, but take care and enjoy the rest of your learning, bye bye.

Opportunities for communication

Opportunities for communication

These resources will be removed by the end of the Spring Term 2026.

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