Part of every childhood will at some point involve playing with toy building blocks, and whilst for many children, it will be no more than a fun activity, for those children having speech pathology treatment, building games will play an important role in their speech and language therapy.

We hesitate to use a pun and say that building games can help to “build” a child’s language skills, but the reality is they can, and in many ways by speech pathologists as part of a child’s treatment.

Whether it be “Stickle Bricks”, “Lego”, “Duplo, “Meccano” or simple, generic wooden or plastic blocks that are used, they all can assist with a child’s language development.

The question is “How?”, and that is what we are going to explain below.

Using Building Blocks To Augment A Child’s Language Development

A speech pathologist can use a variety of therapies and treatments to help a child with their language development, and in each case, the ones chosen will be deemed the most suitable based on the child’s needs.

The emphasis on using building blocks is that they form part of a game or fun activity that the child enjoys, whilst at the same time their communication and language development is encouraged.

Read on, and you will discover just a few ways building games can help those aims.

Counting

One of the most simplistic of all the building block games, but highly effective.

With these games, the emphasis is on getting the child to count the number of bricks they either need or have used.

The easiest example is to get them to build a tall tower brick by brick and as they add each brick get them to say how many they have used. e.g. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 etc.

Simple Arithmetic

Moving the counting scenario to a more advanced level, and more suitable for school-aged children, building games can be used to help them learn simple arithmetic and be able to communicate properly when talking about it.

Using rows of bricks such as 3 x 4 and getting the child to understand that multiplier is one example.

You can also get the child to create their multiple blocks and explain how many there are such as “I have built 3 towers of 10 blocks each”.

Learning Colours

Another basic one, but for children with language and communication difficulties an essential step is that they fully understand, identify, and talk about colours.

Building bricks usually come in a variety of colours and thus can be used in activities such as grouping bricks of the same colour, spotting the odd colour out, or building shapes and towers of the same colour.

Understanding And Following Directions

For building games such as Meccano, which are more complex than simple building blocks, the need to follow directions to create something worthwhile is present.

This allows therapy sessions where the child is given step by step instructions and asked to follow them.

Better still is to get the child into the habit of saying what they need to move forward, such as “I need the blue brick”, or “Next, I have to add the large, yellow, block”.

Learning Words Related To Locations

If you think of location words such as “under”, “on top”, “next to“, “behind”, “in front”, “left”, and “right”, for example, all of these, and more, can be learned whilst playing building games.

An example is getting the child to tell you where they want you to place the next building block, e.g. “Put the blue brick on top of the red one”, or  “ Place the large green block to the right of the small blue one”.

Blending Sounds

More advanced than some of the other games, this involves giving each building block its own sound.

For example, make the small blue block the “TH” sound, or the large red block the “EE” sound.

There are lots of variations, and the key is to place blocks next to each other and get the child to say what the combined sounds are each time.