There are many educators in my family! My mum, my grandmother, many of my aunts and now my brother as well! In my family, the learning never stopped, and the school holidays were always seen as a great opportunity to further our education.
While it is important to rest during the school holidays, there are still plenty of small ways to ensure speech, language and spelling development doesn’t completely stall during the school break! Here are some ideas for long journeys.
Travel Diaries: Not only will these be a wonderful keepsake in the future, they are a great way to develop spelling, storytelling and vocabulary. Diary entries still need a beginning, middle and end, they also require a coherent topic. Furthermore, you need different vocabulary to describe a cityscape rather than the countryside. This develops many skills at once and is great fun! I still have the travel diary I made as a child while visiting New Zealand.
The Pictello iPad application is great for this! It allows you to turn the pictures you have taken into a story book in minutes!
Audiobooks: I love listening to audiobooks while I drive! Listening to stories is a great way to develop understanding of language and comprehension of stories. They also help those long hours on the road go a little faster!
I Spy: This classic game is not just a time filler!! Not only does it encourage children to think about the names of all the things they can see (great for vocabulary) it also makes them think about what letter the words start with. Identifying the first sound in a word is a vital preliminary spelling and reading skill.
Happy holidays!!
Written by Bec Speech Pathologist Newcastle Speech Pathology