Did you know that you can facilitate speech and language development in your child by baking with them? Baking and cooking are natural, engaging activities that target a variety of skills. Read on to learn some tips and tricks from a pediatric speech-language pathologist that you can use with your child while baking to facilitate language development.
How Can I Target Speech and Language Development While Baking with My Child?
While baking, you can naturally model vocabulary, verbs, prepositions, and descriptive attributes. You can also have your child practice following directions, taking turns, and speech sounds.
Vocabulary
Baking often requires use of many items and materials that may not be used on a daily basis, such as different ingredients, appliances, and utensils. Introducing your child to these items helps build and strengthen vocabulary! Here’s an example of how you can do this at home:
- Vanilla extract – “This is vanilla! It is brown and really sweet! It helps give our cookies a sweet flavor, just like the vanilla ice cream you like to eat.”
Verbs
Baking involves a variety of hands on, and delicious, actions. This makes learning to use different verbs and verb tenses fun!
- Common verbs in baking – stir, mix, close, open, pour, pick, turn, squeeze, put, roll, bake
- Irregular past tense verbs –
- We can make cookies / we made cookies
- Let’s eat a cupcake / we ate a cupcake
Prepositions
Prepositions are words that help describe the location or spatial direction of an object. With baking, there are natural opportunities to teach prepositions. You can model the language as you are doing the action, giving your child a direction and supporting their understanding with gestures or pictures. Some examples are:
- We put the cupcakes in/out of the oven
- Put the cookies on/off the tray
- Let’s add the decorations next to/between one another
Descriptive Attributes
Baking is a great way to support the development of using adjectives and various describing words in your child’s utterances. You can practice describing the decorations with your child while using sprinkles, toppings, frosting, cookie cutters, and more.
- Colors – “Should we use blue sprinkles or green sprinkles?”
- Textures – “The batter is sticky“, “The butter is slippery“, “The cake is soft!”
- Temperature – “Is the cake still hot?”, “The cookies are cool, let’s decorate!”
- Taste – “The lemon tastes sour“, “Oh no, we made it too salty!”
- Size – “Your cookie is big“, “This cupcake is smaller than that one”
Turn-Taking
Practice turn-taking skills with family members or siblings during the baking and decorating process. You child can take turns doing various steps, or take turns during a longer step like mixing or kneading so that everyone gets a chance!
- My turn to mix
- Your turn to pour
- Mommy’s turn to knead
Following Directions
Have your child practice following one and two-step directions by giving them steps to follow from the recipe. You will likely need to adjust the language and reduce the amount of words/steps in each direction to support your child’s understanding. Visuals are a great way to support your child’s understanding as their language develops and to support memory of each of the steps in a multi-step direction!
Articulation/Phonology
Find words while baking that have your child’s target sounds in them and practice throughout the recipe as you use items or do different actions. For example, if your child is working on their “r” sounds, there are many ingredients and actions that have the “r” sound in them.
- Pour
- Stir
- Roll
- Flour
- Sugar
- Brown Sugar
Learning can be FUN! At More to Say, we model without expectation. If your child is not imitating your models or following your directions, that is OKAY! Modeling is important for exposure to a variety of language and still will foster development in your child.
Questions About Your Child’s Development?
We would love to set up a free phone screening with you and one of our licensed clinicians! Call us at (203) 828-6790 or email us at info@moretosayct.com to schedule.
