Everyday activities: Mealtimes

Offer your child a choice between 2 items to encourage them to make a choice and communicate what they want.

Remember as you do this to show them the object as you say the word so they can become familiar with the language and link it to the object. For example, would you like the ‘blue’ cup or ‘red’ cup? ‘milk’ or ‘water’? ‘apple’ or ‘banana’?

Your child might make a choice by pointing, reaching, making a sound or copying the word. As your child makes a choice, model the language for them by labelling their chosen item.

A simple way of helping to encourage your child to communicate might be to offer a small amount of snack of their favourite food and hold some back to encourage them to request ‘more’. Allow them plenty of time to respond and you can even model the Makaton sign for ‘more’ to help them communicate.

During mealtimes you can model language and reinforce important topic vocabulary for your child by commenting on what they are doing and labelling the items. This might include food items (apple, biscuit, toast), utensils (plate, cup, bottle) and descriptive language (hot, cold, empty, full, wet, dry).

Mealtimes are a good way of modelling verbs or action words for your child. These are words that describe what you are doing like cutting, pouring, eating, drinking and peeling.

You can model language at a single word level or if your child is beginning to use more single words, try and extend their language by modelling some 2 word phrases, for example, “pouring water”, “drinking milk” and “cutting apple”.