My top 3 toys to teach speech at home, ages 2-4
Find out how to teach speech with toys!
Let’s just make something easier on ourselves and get the most bang for our buck with teaching our toddlers how to talk: use one toy at a time! Not just any toy will do because there are so many that don’t serve multiple purposes in terms of teaching young children how to talk. I’ve rounded up my personal suggestions as a speech therapist for 3 amazing multi-purpose toys and examples of how I’ve used them to teach speech skills. These are toys I actually own and use as a speech therapist! You can do this at home too! And yes, as an Amazon Associate I earn on qualifying purchases - thank you for supporting my business!
To start, let’s highlight one of my son’s current favorites - an activity tree toy. So, we had our activity tree in the basement for several months (we purchased it when he was 1 and he’s turning 2 this week!). He didn’t pay a ton of attention to it at that age and to be fair it is not even a recommended 1-year-old toy. But now at age 2 he is loving that we’ve pulled this toy back into rotation!
Use the paid link below my real life example photo to grab one for your kiddo and use these ideas at home!
We’ve played with it for 3 days straight (I’ve been home under the weather) and he has been able to practice a ton of new speech skills with this! Some examples include: me being able to model novel words for him like ‘beads, spin and maze’ and familiar words to teach would be ‘up, down, open, close, turn, me, you’ plus color words can be incorporated! Oh my goodness, also counting the beads can expose to numbers and as you open/close the doors you can play peek-a-boo. True story: my son pretended he was trick or treating through the door! He knocked on it and said “nom-nom” (his word for food), it was so funny and great to see spontaneous speech!
Next on this short, but carefully curated, list of favorites is a car ramp with cars! It doesn’t have to be gender specific, of course I’m a boy mom so I’ve got this toy out frequently but it works well for all kids!
The paid link is for a similar one to what I have at home because the one I have is super hard to find, I actually used to use it at a previous job but it belonged to the clinic. Then I discovered it at a garage sale and scooped it up immediately for my own collection! My son enjoys playing with this toy often! It has a few cars that comes with it, they can be parked and then race down the ramp. Again this offers multiple speech targets to teach your kids at home! Not only can you teach them to ask for “car”, you can teach words like ‘up, down, fast, slow’ and location words like ‘top, bottom’, plus color words! It’s also a great way to teach your child “ready, set, go!”. I’m pretty sure I’ve targeted that particular skill hundreds of times in therapy sessions using this toy. You can pause before saying ‘go’ to see if your kiddo fills it in! Your child will have opportunities to request ‘more’ and ‘all done’ if you’re also working on any type of core word vocabulary at home. Bonus: if your child isn’t talking yet then use a sign for words like ‘car, again, play’ and so on!
Moving on to our third toy to discuss. It’s a ball and hammer toy - definite must have! The paid link below will show you the exact one that I have in my own collection as a speech therapist! The targets can be a bit similar to the car ramp toy however to be honest both of them have been wildly successful in therapy sessions. I swear, this is a top contender and motivator for so very many kids that I see for speech therapy! Plus my own son loves it too!
Something about this one is a classic! Ideas for words to teach include a new skill: combining 2 words together! I love to use this toy to teach color + noun where the noun gets to stay constant; ‘red ball, green ball, yellow ball’ etc. or keeping the noun constant again but adding a verb ‘ball on, ball up, ball down, ball go’. Single words to teach could include ‘ball, up, down, go, in, out, hammer, hit’ plus color words and counting to 4! Bonus idea is to “hide” the hammer sometimes or one of the balls to encourage your child to have to ask for the missing item! They can request by name ‘ball’ or ‘hammer’ or if needed they can use a sign for ‘ball’ or use a gesture to point to what they need. This hiding strategy is so helpful to teach a request once the child knows what parts go to the toy.
Of course there are a lot more multi-purpose speech toys and I will probably highlight more in another post and/or do posts by ages. But, I wanted to keep this short and sweet with lucky number 3! The whole point here is to maximize speech learning opportunities with just 1 toy at a time, so my goal is if you choose to scoop up these amazing finds then you’ll have the functionality of several toys in just this small collection of 3 things! Win, win!
What else would you like to see on this topic?
I also hope you find the links helpful - I did the online sifting for you! There’s so many choices out there. These are tested out!
I personally use and love all 3 of these toy recommendations to teach speech skills both to my son at home and to the kids I see in the clinic! They are functional yet fun! I can’t wait to hear how you use them to help your little ones learn to talk! Let me know in the comments below!
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