Why not Bowl and Teach!

You can play this game either inside or outside, with skittles or with old plastic bottles filled with water! We've lots of ways that you can use this fun game to target different language areas.

Some of our children at The Speech Sound Clinic with language difficulties can often find following instructions that increase in length and include various concepts a challenge. Children can at times be put off by a structured tabletop language task.

Bowling is a lovely example of a game that can target a variety of skills such as;

• Attention and Listening

• Turn Taking

• Teaching Colours

• Prepositions – beside, behind, in front of, next to.

• Temporal Concepts – first, next, last and before/after.

Help your child to set up the game. You can either ask your child to carry out instructions, for example:

Place the yellow skittle between the blue skittle.

Before you give me the blue skittle, put the green one between the yellow ones.

You can start off with simple instructions and as your child is successful you can start to include more complex instructions.

Or, you can prompt your child to ask you questions or request items, for example:

• Can I have the red skittle?

• Who's turn is it?

If you give your child an instruction and he/she makes an error, look to use the rest of the activity to teach the correct response.

Try to aim for 8-10 more learning opportunities in the game so you can teach and reinforce the correct answer.

This can be done through demonstration and the pairing of language; 'Look I am standing between the yellow skittles, I am putting the ball between the skittles, the yellow skittle is between the blue skittles'.

TEACH, TEACH, TEACH!!!

A simple little activity that we hope can be fun, interactive and promote language learning at the same time.

Enjoy!!

The Speech Sound Clinic.