Vroom Vroom! Rev Up Your Vehicle Play for Pediatric Speech Therapy! 🚗💨
From “Ka-chow!” to “Paw Patrol is on a Roll!” and “Let’s Blaze!” to “Hot Wheels, Let’s Race!”—vehicle shows and merchandise are everywhere!
The best part?
Disney and Nickelodeon have given their cars unique faces and personalities, opening up a whole new world of imaginative play! For Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs), this is CLUTCH (pun totally intended)! Ready to zoom into fun ways to enhance vehicle play for speech development? Let’s hit the gas!🚙
SLP Pro Tips
6-12 Months:
Oversized, Chunky Cars are key! Babies love to manipulate, mouth, and bang! Encourage them to watch older siblings or caregivers model driving cars on the floor. Think motor imitation!
SLP Tip: Imitate all actions and sounds the baby makes. Use one-word nouns with MASS repetition (think silly sounds like “boom,” “whee,” “oh no!”). These sounds are so fun and silly, little ones may even catch a case of the giggles and want to repeat the action over and over just to hear you repeat that silly noise! This helps build their imitation, joint attention, eye contact, auditory skills and vocabulary!
12-24 Months:
Move and Groove! At this stage, toddlers can roll, crash, and drive their cars on the floor, couch, tables and even walls! They can drive their cars into houses and onto other vehicles!
SLP Tip: Continue with those earlier suggestions but add 1- to 2-word combinations. Again, model words over and over (MASS repetition) and praise any and all imitation attempts. Model short phrases to describe the action: “Car go!” or “Crash time!” This supports expressive language skills!
24-48+ Months:
Hot Wheels and Executive Functioning! Little ones are now ready for more complex play with little Hot Wheels cars and track building. This is a golden opportunity to explore executive functioning skills (like planning out their track and problem-solving "bumps in the road") alongside expressive and receptive language concepts.
SLP Tip: Create scenarios where cars face challenges or need to make decisions. Model social language by having the cars interact—“Hey, let’s race!” or “Oh no, we crashed!” This promotes social communication skills that can transfer to interactions with peers! The best part? As I said before, a lof of these vehicles have faces, names, and personalities from the shows your children love! You can use episodes or scenes as a starting place for play and your children can easily imitate and expand from what they already know!
(I can go on and on about Hotwheels and Speech therapy! One of my greatest tools for therapy! Check back for its own Blog post with all the ways to utilize tracks and a few cars to motivate even the most hard to motivate kiddos!)
🎉 Make It Fun with Personalities!
Throughout all these stages, even if your vehicle doesn't have a name or a face, you can easily give your cars their own unique names and personalities! You can then sparks creativity and model social language by having the cars engage with each other, your child, and even yourself in playful conversations.
By incorporating these vehicle-themed strategies, you’ll not only boost your child’s speech and language skills but also provide them with a thrilling play experience they’ll love! So, buckle up and get ready to cruise through professional pediatric speech therapist! 🌟
Tools For Better Speech
Click the pictures for a link to the toys that inspired this blog and my daily therapy!
<3
Sara
For more tips on using play for speech and language development, don’t forget to check out our other blog posts and linked resources!
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