Here are some simple strategies for parents, carers, practitioners, and teachers to help children with their speech and language needs and to help:

• Support attention and listening during motivating activities
• Support understanding of new vocabulary
• To increase spontaneous use of language, with visual support

Strategies

• Try and model spoken language for your child using one to three words, the more they hear the language the more likely they are to learn the word and use them in their requests.
• Use descriptions eg. shapes and colors and names of people in your language models. These words can be used in lots of different activities.
• Use 'Sabotage'. There are many ways to do this:
  • Pretend you don't know what your child wants if they don't ask for it.
  • Give your child little bits of what they want so that they have to keep asking.
  • Hold preferred and motivating items out of reach, place preferred, and motivating items on high shelves/locked cupboards, or move them from their usual place to encourage your child to request the items. If your child is not sure how to ask then MODEL the request for them eg. "apple", "red car".
• Try not to always use "what do you want"? but say quiet, and then model what your child needs to do rather than ask a question.
• If your child is not currently using language, model the single word response e.g "car". If your child uses a single word model the two to three-word phrase eg. If they say "car" or point to a toy car, model "I want the car".
• Model core vocabulary throughout the day.

Please add your own SALT ideas in the comments box!