Dear Parents:

You are invited to help teach your child valuable language skills.  Excellent opportunities for teaching can occur within your home each day.

For this reason, you are being given Let's Talk Today? - A Calendar of Daily Acitivities for Teaching Language Skills .  The calendar is desinged to provide you with activities and techniques for teaching language skills to your child.  The activities can promote language learning with little interruption to your family rountine.  Most activities will take only 10 to 15 minutes to complete and will be stimulating and enjoyable for all family members.  Please feel free to add your own ideas.

While you and your child share experiences and talk about them, essential language learning can take place.  Your child is not merely repeating meaningliess lists of words and sentences, as is done with many drill-based programs.  Instead, he or she is actively involved in an experience with you while learning the concepts, words and sentence structures associated with the experiences.  In other words, your child learns what language can do for him or her.  The language heard and used carries meaning.

By using the activites and language-teaching techniques presented in the calendar, you can give your child practice in such important language skills as

• learning vocabulary - understanding and using new words
• formulating questions to find out information - to learn what to do and how to do it
• commenting about what each person is experiencing and thinking
• giving and following instructions about how to make and do things
• expressing ideas and thoughts about the activities
• planning for future events

If you have any questions about the calendars below please contact one of our staff.

Good luck and have fun!

Sincerely,

The Hartland / Lakeside District Speech-Language Pathologists

From ECL Publications, 708 West Solano Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85013

To see the calendar pages please click on the month below.

  September