Teaching Social Skills With Cars

On the 4th day of posting this Speech Lady gave to me, some ideas to teach preschoolers. 

About 90% of my caseload are boys.  That means I've gotten really good at crashing cars, making horrible wrecking noises and knocking things down.  I like to directly teach my kids how to play with toys and then help them generalize that in real-time play with peers.  Last week we focused on cars.  I made this poster with some target vocabulary for the kids to use. 

Some additional activities were a car wash.  I like this because along with teaching pragmatics, it is so important to teach play skills.  A lot of my kids use 1-2 step play sequences and it's important to expand that as you get so much more language with just one extra step of play. 

With a car wash you have a novel 3 step sequence.  We just used two bins and a towel, but how cute would it be to make these with your kids?!?



We also went on a scavenger hunt for tools around the school so that we could fix a wounded car.  I couldn't have dreamed in my wildest dreams how many peer to peer interactions I got with this activity.  It was very exciting. 


Cars are also a great opportunity to work on basic concepts like size, quantities and color.  I usually like to categorize them by colors, type (car/truck), size etc. 

Love this book to go along with our play!

Play is such a critical part to teaching language and pragmatic skills with little guys.  I know I always forgot about just playing when I worked in the schools.  The school I'm at now is a school founded on the importance of play.

All I know is I've gotten really good at playing and I make some pretty legit environmental sounds these days :)

3 comments:

  1. Thank you so much! I am creating a picture binder of "How to play with ________" for our preschool daughter and this is perfect to add :)

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  2. Thank you so much! I am creating a picture binder of "How to play with ________" for our preschool daughter and this is perfect to add :)

    ReplyDelete

  3. On the 4th day of posting, Speech Lady gave to me some playful teaching ideas! This week, we focused on cars, using a car wash and scavenger hunt for tools to boost peer interactions and language skills. With just two bins and a towel, you can recreate this at home. Visit Homelabels for cute kitchen towel sets!

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