Making a photo album for your child can prove to be very beneficial for her language. I like to have families use personal photos of family members engaging in daily routines. Include all the familiar people in your child’s life engaging in typical activities in order to focus on functional language. For example, use pictures of Mom reading a book, Dad cooking, brother sleeping, Dad eating, and Mom giving the baby a bath.
Our goal is to increase functional language. Many times, children love looking at pictures of themselves so take advantage of that. Take pictures of your child engaging in a variety of tasks that are typical for your family. You may also want to include pictures from special occasions, vacations or events, and family pets.
I recommend using pictures with just a single person in each photo. At the beginning, you are just labeling who is in the photo. Once your child is able to identify who is in the photo by pointing or is able to label by verbalizing, you may want to then have two photos to compare. You can have two facing photos with the same person engaging in different tasks. When you are engaging in this task with your child, you can label the person and the action as you point to the pictures. After many of times “reading” your photo album, you can ask your child to label who is in the picture and what they are doing or ask her to show you the photo of . . . brother sleeping, for example.
This is a great activity for retelling stories too. Using pictures from a recent vacation or outing are fun to use. The pictures are typically full of people that your child is familiar with and you can use lots of language to describe what you did and who you were with.
Photos can also be helpful for preparing a child for an upcoming event as well, like a social story would do.
This is a great photo album that you can purchase from Discount School Supply. It is cloth and great for little ones. Check this one out. It holds 4X6 photos and has 13 pockets. Other options could be ordering photo books or getting a small photo album from a craft or dollar store.
Another option, also at Discount School Supply, is to make these amazing blocks with your family pictures. The cube also includes an infant mirror.
What I love about these two products is that you can update them as your language goals change.
Most importantly, provide the opportunity for you and your child to engage in these tasks together. Take those photo albums off the shelf and talk about who you see and what they are doing. It’s usually lots of fun for the adults too.
Take note of your child’s attention to this task and build on the amount of engagement time slowly. You want this activity to be a positive experience. If your child is tolerant to engage in this task for 2-3 minutes, continue to engage in this activity for 2-3 minutes a day. Slowly increase the amount of time as the weeks go on, in order to provide more language engagement time for you and your child.
Enjoy this play time with your child!