Fun, Free Activities That Strengthen Language Processing During School Breaks

Posted by Erica Warren on Sep 16, 2021

The old saying - If you don't use it you lose it - often describes the cognitive setbacks that many students experience over the summer months. Exercising children's brains with engaging and fun activities is a must. This blog reviews 5 strategies you can use this summer to help your little ones sharpen and strengthen their skills.

free activity ideas to strengthen language processing

5 Strategies to Sharpen Your Mind Over School Breaks

1) When watching TV, discuss the commercials

See if your kids can figure out what product each commercial is promoting and see if they can uncover any inferences or hidden messages. This will help to strengthen higher order reasoning skills!

2) Play with anagrams

Write down a word that has at least 6 letters. In 5 minutes, see how many new words you can create by scrambling the letters. This activity helps to strengthen visual processing, sequential processing and reasoning skills.

3) Play catch while playing a categorizing word game

When you first toss the ball, call out a main idea such as days of the week. When your child catches the ball, they have to say one of the days of the week. When they toss it back to you, you say another day of the week. Players can only say each detail once. If a detail is repeated, the player can't think of another detail, or there are no more detail options, that player loses the round. Keep score and play to 10. Other main ideas could be vegetables, types of dogs, forms of transportation, shapes, presidents and so on. This game develops categorizational skills, rapid automatic naming (RAN) skills,

4) Read a short passage aloud to your child

Before you read a passage, explain that your child's job is to visualize or create a mental image of what you read to them in their mind. Once you have finished the reading, give them a blank piece of paper. Ask them to draw or a series of images that describe what they saw in their mind's eye.

5) Learn the parts of speech with a beach ball

Write verb, noun, adjective, adverb, preposition, article and so forth onto a beach ball. When you toss the beach ball back and forth to one another note where your right thumb lands on the ball. If your thumb lands on a verb, you have to say a words that is a verb. If your thumb lands on a adjective, you have to share an adjective. Each word can only be played once. The game continues until a player repeats a word or can not think of another option. You can play the same game by using figurative language terms such as metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia, assonance... This game helps to reinforce a student's knowledge of grammar and literary terms.

Ready Made Activities and Games to Activate the Brain

If you would prefer to purchase some materials that focus on language building skills, Dr. Warren has many products that you might like. Click on the following titles to learn more.

Cheers, Dr. Erica Warren

Dr. Erica Warren is the author, illustrator, and publisher of multisensory educational materials at Good Sensory Learning. She is also the director of Learning to Learn and Learning Specialist Courses.