The Power of Play in Speech Development: Best Activities for Toddlers

You already know you don't have to teach your toddler how to play, but you may be concerned about your toddler's speech. Should you teach your toddler words more constructively? Should you correct your toddler's pronunciation?

Play works wonders for a toddler's cognitive, social, emotional, physical, and speech development. By playing with parents, family members, friends, and themselves, toddlers can learn most of their base vocabulary and refine their pronunciation.

As with babies, playing is still the most effective way to promote toddler development. However, toddler play differs from baby play because toddlers have more skills under their belts. Let's briefly examine how play encourages development, answer common questions, and list five fun activities to build speech skills.

Why Is Play Important for Speech Development?

Play is essential to toddlerhood! It is a fun way to explore the world, make discoveries, and challenge the boundaries of reality and parental rules. So much experimentation happens when toddlers play, and a lot of that experimentation may leave parents scratching their heads.

But don't worry! All those seemingly random combinations and shenanigans are totally normal in development. Honestly, it would be incredibly concerning if your little tot wasn't playing, experimenting, and pushing the boundaries of "What if?"

Development of any kind is linked to other areas of development--there's no such thing as developing one skill in isolation. Playing covers all the development bases--no classrooms, curriculum, or teachers needed!

Play Engages the Senses

Toddlers love to see, touch, smell, and listen to all the things, and it turns out that they need to! Much like babies who don't know until they handle or taste something, toddlers need to physically explore things with their senses to understand them.

You already know that explaining what something is and how it works doesn't satisfy your toddler. Your little one needs to experience something to understand it.

A bucket of water, patch of dirt, pile of leaves, box of rocks, or anything else you can think of are incredibly engaging sensory activities for playing. Notice how your toddler observes and experiments a bit before babbling away and playing with the activity. That is sensory play and language development at its finest!

A Note on Sensory Toys for Toddlers

The market is flooded with plastic electronic sensory toys for toddlers. While lights, songs, and fidget switches are fun for toddlers, they do not provide as rich an experience as one would hope.

Such devices label colors, sounds, letters, numbers, and other such things before your little one gets to experience them. Even then, the experience often has the same or similar physical feeling as the last term learned: plastic. A sensory play-learning approach can achieve more.

For example, take a little bucket of rocks. From a sensory standpoint, there are different textures, colors, weights, and sizes to feel and describe. Then, there are various skills to practice: stacking, balancing, tossing and catching, banging, scraping, counting, comparing, and more.

The more senses engaged in playful learning, the more your little one is likely to learn deeply. This isn't to say you should have no plastic or electronic toys in your home, but it is something to keep in mind to ensure your toddler is engaged in the simplest and deepest ways for creative development.

Play Promotes Cognitive Development

On that note, play before age six shapes the brain's structure, function, and learning processes, significantly impacting how one will make goals and focus later in life (source). 

Moreover, not playing or settling for hours of screens will rob toddlers of precious neural development (source).

Four or more hours of screen time a day makes a toddler nearly five times more likely to struggle in communication skills, nearly twice as likely to struggle with fine motor skills, and two times as likely to have underdeveloped personal and social skills (source).

Across the animal kingdom, we see how crucial play is for learning survival skills and testing one's limits. The same is true of human children. Though their play looks different, human children still develop crucial skills cognitively, physically, emotionally, and socially through play similar to some animal species.

Through playing, little ones test the boundaries and explore to gain an understanding of those things and to figure out how parents will react. Toddlers note how parents react to their children's actions in facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and words for reference.

A parent's words and reactions teach young children new vocabulary and whether something is right or wrong. You are investing in his language development by playing with and talking to your toddler. The more you speak and react in playtime, the more your little one will pick up!

In From Babbling to Words: A Comprehensive Guide to Baby Language Development, I delved into the specifics of how language develops from babyhood to two years old. Check it out!

Play Pushes Social and Emotional Development

Playing is the foundation of social and emotional development in little ones; we see this in animals that play, too! Even human play without words encourages social and emotional development. What matters is that parents spend time playing with their toddlers.

Playing with friends, siblings, and other family members is also excellent, but as a parent, you set the standard, the rules, and the worldview for your toddler. Time playing with you is crucial for making everything make sense!

Odds are that your toddler is babbling with a few understandable words sprinkled here and there. Encourage verbal communication with praise, eye contact, and responses.

Your encouragement and engagement mean the world to your toddler, and they will further increase her desire to learn more words and communicate more.

How Does Play Evolve from Babyhood to Toddlerhood?

In babyhood, your little one communicated primarily with coos, crying, and smiles. By toddlerhood, your little tike has a few words under his belt and a whole array of facial expressions, tones, and gestures to play and communicate with.

Playing as a baby was limited by physical ability in babyhood, but toddlerhood brings mobility, climbing, running, jumping, and many other physical skills to boot.

Another major evolution from baby to toddlerhood is emotional complexity. Your baby felt plenty of emotions (and probably communicated them, too!), but toddlers can feel more complex emotions and have no idea how to show them at first.

For example, toddlers can feel shame, guilt, pride, and the difference between frustration and anger. However, they don't know how to express these appropriately until they observe examples, learn words for communicating their feelings, and practice with rewards (source).

It's a long process riddled with tantrums and meltdowns, but staying calm and consistent is the key. Moreover, talking about an emotion through play will help your toddler experiment with communicating feelings and solving problems in a safe place without the emotional tension.

For more on how to handle toddler tantrums in this delicate season, read The Ultimate Guide to Toddler Tantrums: How to Handle Them Like a Pro.

How Can I Incorporate Educational Activities in Play?

First, you need to realize that all play is beneficial and educational in toddlerhood. Once you've accepted that, you can see a whole world of opportunities for educating your toddler through play.

Learning to recognize and name animal species often comes through playing with animal figurines, especially when reinforced with zoo trips, animal books, and nature documentaries.

For math, counting tiny, normally forbidden objects is a fun activity your toddler can play with in numerous ways. Whether you try to buy a certain number of them or play a trading game between stuffed animals with funny voices, your toddler may enjoy playing "real life" situations with counting.

Playing with art or tracing lines and circles in the sand is a mesmerizing activity for toddler playtime that encourages fine motor skills. For older toddlers with a destructive bent, cutting lines on paper with child-safe scissors is fun and builds skill.

Just about any type of activity or play will result in some kind of skill development or education. Everything is new, and the mundane things are still fascinating, with hidden lessons to learn. That's what makes toddlerhood enjoyable!

Should I Correct My Toddler's Pronunciation and Grammar?

No. At least avoid doing so directly. Correcting your toddler's pronunciation and grammar is a constant chore that could make your little one feel ashamed or frustrated. So, instead of direct correction, restate what your toddler said to "confirm" you heard her correctly.

For example, your toddler may come to you with pieces of cut paper and say, "I cutted paper." You may then make eye contact while pointing at the paper and say, "You cut this paper?"

Many toddlers will either respond by nodding, saying yes, or repeating what you said before running off to do something else. You don't have to track your toddler down and demand that she say it right.

Toddlers learn by observation, so you will have taught the lesson by confirming what your toddler said with proper construction. Additionally, making a habit of clearly speaking wherever you are will give your toddler more opportunities to hear clear speech.

You will be surprised at how quickly your toddler will learn proper pronunciation and grammar through observation! No studying or worksheet exercises are needed!

5 Best Toddler Activities to Promote Language Development

After volunteering in a nursery, serving as a house parent to a group of toddlers and babies, and raising a few kids of my own, I've settled on some favorite toddler activities for promoting language development.

Not every toddler will be excited about these, so you may need to adjust them to fit your little one's personality and interests.

1. Cashier

Cashier is a game of trading money for things, but it can be played in many ways. The goal is to use identifier vocabulary for the things, numbers to count the words and costs, and simple exchange language.

For example, you can take a little basket and fill it with a variety of toys. Then, take it to your toddler and show what you have. Ask him how much each thing will cost and pay with money, paper, coins, or imaginary money.

Encourage counting, naming items, and polite language. You can even take turns and shift spaces (outdoors, living room, kitchen).

2. Simple Card or Board Games

If your little one has grown up watching you play card or board games, she will likely take an early interest in them. But complex games are too difficult (and expensive) for your toddler to learn with. 

So, choose some simple games and modify the rules to something she will understand. Here are a few toddler favorites I've found over the years.

Board Games:

• Sorry!

• Trouble

• Chutes and Ladders

• Jenga

• any of the Bluey games

• Bingo

• Twister

• Connect 4

Card Games:

• WAR

• Go Fish

• UNO

• Crazy 8s

• Matching games

As your little one grows and begins to understand the rules, you can introduce the fundamental rules and more complex games.

Different kids learn at different paces. At three years old, one of my toddlers was playing Monopoly and Battleship by adult rules, but another of mine is well past toddlerhood and still cannot understand Trouble. It's not a lack of intelligence--just different interests.

3. Doctor

Playing Doctor is a fantastic way to introduce and reinforce vocabulary for body parts, aches, illnesses, and degrees of pain. Create a simple pain level chart and set up a "doctor's office" for this game.

When you visit your toddler doctor, describe your pain and point to the part of your body where it hurts. Then, let your toddler decide what happens next! This game leads to many hilarious memories and goofy suggestions.

4. Cooking

Playing "restaurant" with a toy cooking set, but actually getting in the kitchen and creating something tasty together is even better. Start with rolling out or decorating cookies, helping you stir batter, or doing the dishes.

Over time, you'll be able to introduce measures, numbers, ingredient vocabulary, oven settings, pan materials, how to tell if something is ready to serve, and so much more. Cooking is a tangible activity with lots of communication options and a tasty reward!

5. Gardening

No list of activities for speech development is complete without something outside. Gardening is a superb way to introduce your little one to life cycles, weather cycles, and how a person's actions or inactions impact the environment. Even better, toddlers often find gardening fun!

Besides the ridiculous amount of vocabulary your little one can learn about colors, textures, visuals, smells, insects, and plant names, your little bug can learn fine motor skills, planning, and observation skills and distinguish between beneficial plants and weeds.

You can help your toddler create birdhouses, tiny rock paths through the flowers, and little huts for imaginative play. Getting outside to play in the dirt and take care of things is a marvelous exercise in fresh air and sunshine!

In a Nutshell

Play is crucial to toddler development, especially in speech. Creating playtime, games, and activities in various settings will ensure your toddler gains exposure to a ton of vocabulary and ideas that will pop into imaginative play for years to come.

Playing with your toddler is one of the best ways to invest in your child's development, so have fun!