Creating Voices Therapy

This week’s Language Therapy Toy of the Week is the Melissa & Doug Ice Cream Counter 🍦🍨a must-have for building early speech and language skills!
✨ Target key skills like:
🗣️ CV/VC/CVC words
🙌 Exclamatory words
🧠 Following directions
👋 Use play to encourage imitation, joint attention, and early conversation skills.

We have linked this toy and other similar pretend play activities from Melissa & Doug on our Amazon storefront:
https://amzn.to/4stTNxR

Meet our team 👋✨
We’re so excited to continue working with you this year at Creating Voices! We look forward to supporting your child’s speech, language, and feeding journey in 2026 🤍🗣️

We have been guilty, even as a SLPs, to get overly eager and start working on imitation of words right from the beginning. We really need to work on imitation of play and gross body movement FIRST! Did you know that we actually need a child to be imitating our movements before we target word use? Until we have imitation of body movement, WE ARE NOT READY FOR WORDS!
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Here we define imitation and go through the different levels of learning imitation. As with all our tasks, we need to find the level where the child is, and come up with our realistic expectation of where to start to work towards. For instance, if a child is not imitating clapping or social games, then we should not expect them to start to imitate words or even sounds!
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We hope this is informative and gives you the information needed to help support your child! We know this is a lot to learn, but are so proud of all your efforts to better understand language development for your child!
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Children have to understand words BEFORE they can use words to communicate. This understanding of language is known as receptive language. We MUST prioritize a child's ability to understand language in order to assist them in becoming verbal communicators.
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In the slides above we talk about skills we are expecting by the time a child is 18 months of age, strategies to address receptive language, and ways to begin building a strong core vocabulary (understanding this vocabulary first, then working on saying the words).
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There are so many pieces to receptive language and these skills take time. We want to help you understand the importance of receptive language and assist you in implementing strategies into your daily life!
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Based on Laura Mize- "Teach Me to Talk"
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✨Play is the way children learn. It’s how they interact with other same aged children.
✨It is so important for language development!
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✨Did you know there are different stages of play?
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☝🏻☝🏼☝🏽☝🏾☝🏿Here we have defined play and explained it’s importance! We have given a few tips, too! 👆🏿👆🏾👆🏽👆🏼👆🏻
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Thank you for reading! We are here to help!