Vocabulary Linky by Helen

Today we are joining in with the Linky started by Jenna at Speech Room News.  The question is about our top 5 resources for working on vocabulary.  This is a great question as I spend a lot of time doing vocabulary work.  So many children with receptive and expressive language problems of all ages have difficulties in this area.  Have a look at my post here for more information about how to work on vocabulary difficulties.

But now, onto the resources!

1.  Young children learn best through play.  So all sorts of different toys can be great for vocabulary development in the 2-5 age range.  Whatever the child is interested in works best.  I can’t pick one particular toy for this one, but I find that there’s lots of vocabulary in toy vehicles, tea sets, play food and farm animals!  And that’s just a start – move on to puppets, dinosaurs, sand and water play, craft activities – pretty much all toys have plenty of words you can introduce with them.

2.  Usborne books.  As well as toys, books are great with all ages.  Usborne books in particular, I find great with preschoolers.  They do lovely books such as this one

which has a theme for each page and lovely clear picture of a range of words on the theme.  Also, I especially like their Look and Say range.  Here is the beach one.

Inside there are vocab pictures on one side of the page and a scene of people doing things with all the objects.  Great for naming things, and then using them in sentences to describe what is happening.  You can find this book here.

3.  Rhodes to Language.  This brilliant book is probably the paper resource I use most with older children with language disorders (6+).  It is great to use myself and also to hand out to parents or schools as the instructions are really clear.  There are lots of semantic games (odd one out, identifying similarities and differences, antonyms and synonyms etc) as well as multiple meaning words, adjectives and adverbs – lots of brilliant games for vocabulary.  Check it out here if you don’t already own a copy!

4.  Speak Clearly Word Families CD.  Naomi at Speak Clearly makes a range of CDs with speech and language games on.  Again these are great to hand out to others as well as using them myself.  The Word Families collection is the one I use the most.  I especially love the Link It games, where you can make connections between lots of different items on the board.  These are games you can play lots of times as there are always more connections that you can make.

5.  Hedbanz – you can see from my battered box that I use this one a lot.  The idea is that each person has a picture attached to a band on their head and they have to ask questions to work out what it is.  It’s great for getting really solid vocabulary skills, but there are lots of other skills you can use it for too – logical thinking, asking questions etc.

Do check out the other posts in this linky here.  I’ve discovered lots of resources I didn’t know about already!