LSL at Home
LSL at Home
We’ve compiled listening and spoken language (LSL) resources and activities to help maintain fun, language-rich environments at home. Check out #ClarkeLSLTip posts on social media to follow along.
Resources:
- Summer Learning Week (July 6-12, 2021) : The awareness week presented by the National Summer Learning Association is a celebration dedicated to elevating the importance of keeping children learning, safe and healthy. Find themes, activities and resources to utilize throughout summer here.
- Mainstream News: Find recommendations for tech tools, read why it’s important to have hearing technology serviced in the summer, discover ways to plan an enriching summer of fun — and more.
- Clarke Book Club: Find a list of inclusive books and resources. Follow along on social media with the hashtag #ClarkeBookClub.
- Wide Open School: Parents and educators can find educational resources and and content for K-12 students, including virtual field trips on this free online resource.
- PBS LearningMedia: Parents can search by topic and filter by grade level, subject area, and resource type on this free online resource.
- Clarke’s Hear Me Out Blog: Heather Stinson, Clarke itinerant teacher of the deaf and author of the Hear Me Out blog, shares resources that may be helpful for families who are transitioning to online learning.
- Scholastic Learn at Home: For day-by-day projects to keep children reading thinking and growing, check out Scholastic’s learn at home resources.
- Sound at Home: Our friends at Hearing First share tips to improve access to sound at home.
- Listening & Spoken Language Activity Calendar for May: Daily activities created by Melanie Abramowitz, Speech-Language Pathologist. In honor of Better Hearing and Speech Month, this calendar features a new activity for each day in May.
LSL at Home Activities:
- Infuse outdoor learning with quality play this summer! A walk around the neighborhood, a quick game of hide-and-seek at the park or a short hike on the weekend all count as active play. Consider how you can incorporate casual learning into the outing. The more interesting and engaging the activity, the more likely children will want to continue it.
- Create a summer scrapbook! It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, but it can be a great way to keep children writing over the summer. Print out pictures or have children draw their own illustrations to go along with their memories.
- Dive into a book adventure and draw your ideal bookshelf! Jane Mount, artist and illustrator, created a book spine outline for families to fill in together. Download a template and illustrate your own!
- Celebrate Summer Learning Week as a family with an ocean-inspired activity. Create a paper stingray, participate in a conservation challenge or watch an animated video of the ocean. Find ocean-inspired activities and more here.
- Add ‘writing to a pen pal’ to your summer to-do list! Pen pal programs help students hone reading and writing skills, forge friendships from afar and can foster interest in social studies and geography.
- Host a virtual family dance party. Music often grabs the attention of children who are deaf or hard of hearing, stimulates their spoken language and supports the development of new vocabulary and language structures.
- Virtually get “wild” for sound and save the date for Clarke’s Listening Walk at the Philadelphia Zoo. Challenge your child to describe the animal sounds they hear outside or on the television.
- Grab alphabet magnets, a dry erase board or markers and test your young learner’s letter recognition skills by playing the game “I Spy!”
- Play with different musical instruments or create ones using pots and pans – talk about the differences in duration (long vs. short sounds), pitch (high vs. low sounds) and intensity (loud vs. quiet sounds)
- Create an experience book with your child. Include their name, birthday, fun facts and a description of their hearing technology
- Participate in a unique learning experience and take a virtual tour of a museum . Challenge your child to identify different objects in paintings and sculptures
- Make your favorite food and talk about the way it looks, smells, sounds, tastes and feels
- Have a picnic indoors – talk about what food you will bring and what you will need; work on following auditory directions to set the picnic table
- Put a toy in a bag or hidden box, describe the toy to your child and have the child guess what it is
- Pick a speech sound your child is working on and point out the different things around your house that start with the sound
- Talk about “Same” and “Different”: Even very young children can understand the concepts of similarity and difference: Are these colors the same or different? Do these letters look the same or different? Do they sound the same or different? Are these quantities the same or different? Making children aware of similarities and differences can help them “organize” the world, and prepare for school settings.
