Speech Therapy Toys for Language Development

Amanda Banta:  Playing with pretend food allows a child to mirror a huge part of their day - eating! Not only can children learn words for food, you also can sneak in lessons on colors, counting, shapes, and dinner table behaviors. This set includes a knife that slices through the fruit, and the pieces can be stuck back together, giving your toddler an action and reaction to perform. My son is a do-er more than a pretender; cutting and serving fruit to his therapist and me grabbed his attention more than the simple play food we had at home ever did.

Tim Ponisciak:  Children's toy microphones are great speech therapy toys. They help bring out the extroverted side of a lot of kids too! This mic has a record feature which is great fun to surprise people with. Great for helping to teach kids to enunciate.

Amanda Banta:  Most kids love animals and a farm set makes a great toy for getting those little guys talking because they can do so much with it. Kids can name the animals and mimic their sounds, sing "Old MacDonald," take the animals in and out of their spot at the barn, all of which develops their word usage and vocabulary.

Amanda Banta:  One of my son's therapists pulled bubbles out of a drawer one winter day and my son's eyes lit up. Bubbles? Inside? Even I was curious! They blew bubbles almost weekly from then on. As tiny bubbles floated around, his therapist incorporated questions or situations that encouraged him to respond with words. His therapist stressed that blowing bubbles would strengthen the physical part of speaking, shaping his mouth the right way for certain sounds.

I reinforced this by blowing bubbles while playing in the yard, at the park, the little league field, the bathtub, anywhere I could get them in.

Amanda Banta:  Playing with a baby doll can have many benefits on both girls and boys, helping them to apply the words they're learning to themselves. By modeling the actions of your child with the doll you can help your child to hear, use and understand the words for his own body parts and behaviors. Pretend the baby is crying or asking for something and your child can help to take care of those needs.

This doll has a removable cap and outfit, which allows your child to dress the baby and to hear and use the words for the clothes, diapers, hats, etc. that he probably wears regularly.

Hannah Scott:  I'm not proud of it, but my son has seen me talking on my phone a LOT in his two years of life! (Maybe you can relate?) When we realized his speech was somewhat delayed, I started encouraging him to use his own toy phone to "call" our friends and family! This version has buttons that mimic the look of smartphone apps, and each one plays a little clip of a song. Music has always been a great motivator for him, so this was a great tool to promote speech!

Erynn:  My two kids have always loved their pet vet toy, but I attended a speech therapy session with my nephew (who has a speech condition) and his therapist used the toy to encourage speech!

Each door is a different color, and kids will like taking the pets in and out of each door and taking care of them. At the same time, you can encourage them to talk about the dog and cat, check out the colors, and practice opening and closing each door.

Hannah Scott:  My son received this book for his second birthday, when he still had very few words in his vocabulary. He was SO excited to open each page to find a new scene from the Daniel Tiger show (different rooms in Daniel's house, Dr. Anna's office, Baker Aker's Bakery, Teacher Harriet's Classroom, etc.) and see his favorite characters. We began by having him point to the items that were labeled as vocabulary words, and he soon began to repeat many of them himself. Score! We still read this several times a week to reinforce the words he's still working on.