How to help your child’s communication using songs

Hi I am Laura Black and I am Charmaine Tearle and we’re speech and language therapists. We both run April cottage therapies and we’ve created some top tips on how to support your child’s communication.

So here’s three ways that you can help your child’s communication using songs.

So the first way is using songs for routines. So your child might find,  change of routine really tricky, or it might be really hard to just move them onto the next thing. So you can use songs to help aid their understanding of what’s going to happen next and to distract them while you’re doing it.

So it might be things like when they’re going to brush their teeth, you could use songs like here we go around the mulberry bush, but change the words to this is the way we, and then add in the action that you’re going to do.

The next way that you can use songs is to leave off words at the end of familiar songs. So once your child gets to know the song, you can start to leave pauses.

So you could say row, row, row your, and leave a pause. They might fill in the word boat. If they don’t, it doesn’t matter.

And you can just carry on the song and it would flow really nicely. The other way that we can use songs to help with communication is action songs. So even before your child is starting to use words, they might be able to imitate your actions in songs like wind, the bobbing up and head, shoulders, knees, and toes.

It’s really helpful for you to sit opposite your child while you’re doing these songs so they can see your face and help to copy your actions.