Adult Directed Play

Sometimes I feel like a broken record when I'm telling families to work on more adult-directed play to help with communication. Of course, kids should have free play to do what they want and play how they want. Although since little kids are learning through their play sometimes adult-directed play is needed. It can help to promote language. Adult-directed play can help to get them to make requests, imitate, identify familiar items, and learn new words.

How does Adult-direct play work? The adult takes control of the items. Adults have a plan on what words they want to work on.

Activities-

Blocks-

When playing with blocks the adult takes the blocks, only giving the child two blocks. Then you can work on requesting more, and identifying colors or items if there are pictures on them. You could add pictures to blocks too if you wanted to work on certain things. You can model "up, fall down, uh oh, boom."

Puzzles-

Again taking the pieces. The child can work on requesting more and identifying familiar items, and animal sounds. Some puzzles will say what an item is when put in or out and as fun as those are I turn them off sometimes because they just become a distraction.

Shape sorter-

Same things, different toy.

Adult-directed play can just be adults leading the play too.

With a farm set, you could model how the animals walk or make them eat. You could then ask your child to feed the animal. You can work on identifying animals and animal sounds.

With kitchen sets or pretend play, it can be leading a play dinner, modeling pretending to eat food, and asking for some coffee. You can work on naming foods and requesting, modeling "I want a banana."

With Cars, you can work on filling in the phrase "Ready, set......go." You can model "beep beep, vroom vroom."

Kids learn from adults or other kids. Other things I tend to repeat a lot are model and repetition. They both play in the adult-directed play. You're modeling and repeating while you lead the play. Don't get me wrong, go along with their play too. You can't always lead everything. They need time to explore and show off their skills freely. You can still model while you follow their lead. It's just sometimes they need that extra push to use words to communicate. The most important part is to have fun and make it playful.