Who doesn’t love playing with Kinetic Sand? It’s such a fun and engaging texture, but it can also be used to target several different speech and communication skills. When I use it in therapy, I like to have small toys that we can bury in the sand. When playing with your child at home, you can find small items to bury in the sand as well. It can be used to practice prepositions if you talk about where the items are in the sand or if they are inside or outside the sand.
Another of my favorite skills to target with sand is vocabulary. There are so many different uses for sand and locations where we find sand that are fun to talk about! For example, you can talk about the beach and ocean using the sand. By doing this, you can incorporate animals, colors, and verbs (swim, jump, hide, eat, etc.). If your child is working on talking in sentences, you can use the phrase “I found ____” while looking for items in the sand. You can even have your child practice describing the objects they find in the sand (big, small, animal, object, color).
If your child is working on articulation sounds, you can also use the list of words to practice that you received from your therapist while playing with the sand. If you need a list of words containing your child’s target sounds, talk to your therapist about it. We are happy to provide you with words so that you can practice them at home. If you want to pair the sand to a common movie to further increase your child’s interest, try talking about Finding Nemo. This will allow you to ask a bunch of wh- questions about the movie as well! Hopefully this information has helped you to start thinking about how you can use something as simple as Kinetic sand to target a wide variety of skills while still feeling fun. Your child most likely will not even know you are working on homework! Have fun!
If you have any questions or concerns about your child’s speech and language development please contact us and we would be happy to answer any questions you may have!