With toys, there’s a great scope for educational entertainment. Every toy that your kid has can be used to practice on his life skills. In this post, I’m going to discuss how you can use Mr. Potato head for speech therapy
Speech Therapy with Mr. Potato Head
Mr. Potato head is an all-time favorite and is considered a motivational toy. It allows the kids to explore with their hands, practice pretends to play, and be creative in a number of ways.
There are some very cool ways you can do speech therapy with Mr. Potato Head, some of which we ill discuss today. All these activities make them more eager to communicate which is why Mr. and Mrs. Potato Heads are considered toys necessary in a speech therapy room. They trigger the child’s responses and potential to question. This post will give you ideas on how best to do speech therapy with Mr. Potato Head and to enhance a child’s communication skills.
Requesting
A fun activity to try with kids is to pair them up and give one child Mr. Potato Head’s body while the other one has the tray containing all the body parts to be assembled. The one with the body has to ask for the body parts one by one and assemble them on the head while the other one has to find the parts. This will not only help them work as a team, but they will also learn body parts.
In fact, you can also use the opportunity to discuss the functions of the different body parts. Mr. Potato Head sees with his eyes, listens with his ear, and smells with his nose. Ask them to point out different parts of the body.
Language skills
Try to be specific and short when you discuss each part. This way, you can teach him adjectives such as, “May, I have the orange nose?” or “Mr. Potato Head has blue shorts just like yours.”
To learn adjectives, color is the easiest part to start with; it will help him learn how to describe things.
You can also easily add in prepositions, “Put the eyes above the nose.” Or “Put the mouth below the nose.” You can also scatter the body parts around the room and discuss where each body part is placed; on the chair, under the table, and so on.
Learning verbs
This is also a skill set that can be taught with the help of Mr. Potato Head. Try to pretend to play with the kids and use sentences like, “look, Mr. Potato Head is running” or “Mr. Potato Head ate a banana today.” Try to keep the sentences short. This will help him understand the use of verbs in sentences.
Comparison
Build two different Mr. Potato Heads. You can build one and let your child create the other. Now discuss the differences and similarities between the two. Ask him to point out the differences if he has trouble formulating sentences. Later, make those sentences for him and encourage him to repeat after you.
Create Your Potato Head
Ask two kids to sit facing their backs to each other and give each one of them a Mr. Potato Head. Also, provide them with the body parts. The idea is to assemble two identical Mr. Potato Heads without watching each other assemble.
This activity will help your child understand instructions. You can use gestures to explain those instructions.
Hunting Parts
This is also one of the activities that you can do with the kids. Hide the body parts around the room and give the kids some clues and let them hunt with the help of the clues. This will not only help build language skills but also improve their analytical abilities.
If your child is beginning to just grasp speech, go with simple directives, such as “under the table” or you can say “under the big blue table to the right”. This is a fun play as the kids get really excited to hunt down each and every part of Mr. Potato Head. At the same time, you can help them understand different parts of the body and simple command words.
Each of these activities should be adapted to your child’s speech development milestone. You can keep adding more directions and words to build your child’s vocabulary and speech.
I hope this article will help you to find out ways to use “Mr. Potato Head for speech therapy”. If you notice your child is different and you are unable to cope with it and these strategies aren’t also helping, I would love to help you determine your child’s individual needs. Please reach out to set up a free consultation. We are here to support you as you help your child blossom!
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