Not Just Play

Don’t let it deceive you. Play isn’t just fun and good times for kiddos. It’s essential for your child’s overall development. ALL children learn through experiencing, seeing, listening and doing…....which is the essence of play. This is true for all children…..typical children and children with disabilities.

Let’s take an all time favorite play activity and break it down. Play-Doh! Your child’s speech therapist, occupational therapist or play therapist may use Play-Doh frequently in sessions. You may think to yourself, “Play-Doh again?!?! When does the actual work start?!?! Where are the flashcards? Where are the fancy programs and materials?!?” The beauty of play is…..your child is actually working incredibly hard AND having fun at the same time. From a speech and language perspective, here are just some of the things your child may be working on when they play with Play-Doh by themselves, in a therapy session, with an adult or with friends:

-Joint Attention: When playing Play-Doh with your child, you are working on improving their joint attention skills such as increasing their ability to share within your enjoyment of the Play-Doh activity, to share their enjoyment with you, to be engaged within the activity together, to gaze shift from the objects to your eyes and from your eyes to the objects for social referencing, to monitor and follow your eye gazing, to initiate bids with you to pay attention to what they are doing/attending to and to respond to these bids from others. Joint attention is an important precursor for social communication and interaction.

-Receptive and Expressive Language: Single words, phrases and sentences, etc. There is SO MUCH language involved when playing with Play-Doh. For example:
-nouns: dough, cup, lid, rolling pin, knife, cookie cutter, scissors, all the shapes of the cookie cutters, all the objects you can build with the dough, etc.
-verbs: open, close, push, pull, roll, squish, squeeze, cut, pat, and all the actions your shapes can do like walk, run, jump, swim, eat, drink, sleep, fly, drive, etc.
-descriptors: in, out, on, off, up, down, fast, slow, big, little, long, short, tall, same, different, dark, light, stuck, soft, squishy, hard, pretty, cool, fun, colors, happy, sad, mad, silly, excited, etc.

-Understanding and Using Social Communication: There are a million different social opportunities within Play-Doh! For instance:
-Initiating requests “I want purple dough”
-Requesting continuation “more”
-Terminating interaction “finished”
-Asking for “help”
-Protesting “no blue dough!”
-Securing attention “Mommy!!!” or tapping Mommy’s arm
-Directing attention “Look!!”
-Turn-taking “My turn for rolling pin.” “Your turn to roll.”
-Sharing/Giving/Trading “Share pink dough with me.” “Give scissors to Dad.” “Trade red dough for green dough”
-Showing: “Look Dad! I made a boat!”
-Initiating social comments, responding to social comments and engaging in conversations
-Asking questions to gain information
-Talking about what you like and don’t like
-Much more!

Emotional Regulation Skills:
-Waiting
-Responding to “okay”
-Labeling/sharing emotions (“Julie is happy! Julie likes Play-Doh!” “Ben is mad! Ben wants green dough!”)

-Play Skills: There are many different types of play skills you can work on and integrate within a Play-Doh activity:
-Constructive play: appropriately manipulating the dough and building things out of the dough
-Symbolic (pretend) play: pretend baking cookies, pretend playing with the animals and vehicles you build, baking a pretend birthday cake for a pretend birthday party
-Parallel play: increasing your child’s ability to play with their own Play-Doh parallel (next to) another person playing with their own Play-Doh at the same table
-Cooperative play: playing together with another person
You can integrate these different skills and work on different things at the same time (Constructive/Cooperative play, Parallel/Pretend play, etc.)

Sequencing: Understanding the sequencing language, using the sequencing language and completing the steps (first choose color, then open dough, next dough out, then push dough, then roll dough, next choose cutter, then cutter on dough, then push cutter, next cutter off, last pick up shape, etc.)

Preliteracy: You can use ABC cookie cutters and work on the sounds of the letters, sound segmentation, sound blending, rhyming, spelling and reading or you can roll out the dough and shape your own letters

Themes: You can engage in a Play-Doh theme to incorporate different vocabulary and play skills. For instance, for Halloween time you can work on the Halloween vocabulary, use Halloween cookie cutters, pretend carve pumpkins, make pretend candy, practice Halloween routines and social language, etc.

On top of all the wonderful speech and language skills incorporated within Play-Doh, there are of course all the important fine motor skills, visual-spatial skills, strengthening and sensory integration components as well! The possibilities are truly endless. This is the case with all play!

To help your child with autism make Play-Doh or any other play activity a meaningful learning experience, we can use various transactional supports. We can use play routines (playing in a similar way each time to help them understand and interact then once they understanding the routine and are functioning within the routine you can change the routine up), we can sing while we play (“this is the way we roll the dough, roll the dough, roll the dough”), we can use helpful phrases while we play (“first roll then cutter,” “time for roll….roll is finished,” “Mommy’s turn cut. Joe is waiting,” etc.) we can use visuals (picture symbols, how-to visual boards, my turn cards, waiting cards, commenting boards, etc.) and we can break down our language while limiting the use of questions (instead of “Okay, let’s play Play-Doh. Come sit at the table with me. What do you want red or purple or green? Can you open the dough?”, break down the language like, “Time for Play-Doh. Sit at table. Table. Open dough. Open.”).

Also, we may need to start slowly with Play-Doh or any other play activity. We do not want to force the activity upon our children. Your child may need to stand back and watch you play by yourself for a while. Then your child may come closer to the table and watch. They then may need to explore the dough for a while to get used to the texture. Then they may start to squish the dough briefly while standing at the table. They then may want to sit and play for a little longer. After some time and after your child becomes more comfortable and understands more, you will be playing parallel with your child and then cooperatively!

All children learn and develop naturally through interacting with the people around them, through exploring their environments, through participating within routines and through PLAY (experiencing, seeing, listening and doing). Not only is this the effective way for a child to learn but it’s also the FUN way for a child to learn. And most importantly, you will be bonding with your child and building on your relationship with your child while helping them learn and make progress. It’s not just play!

~Laura and Amanda
KidSpeak, LLC
www.kidspeakdallas.com