Teaching Conversation Skills

A good first step for teaching conversations is introductions. When our child sees someone, we can encourage them to introduce themselves, “hi my name is _____, what’s your name?”. “Nice to meet you”. If this is too advanced, we can start with “hi””bye”. Greetings are a great way to help our children navigate making new friends and generating social skills. We can model this easily throughout the day, when we meet someone, or during pretend play.

Have the toys practice these conversation skills. Continue expanding the conversation to show our kids what a conversation looks like. “Hi dino, I’m dolly”, “how are you?, “I’m good!”. If your child doesn’t want to participate yet or doesn’t know how, use one toy in each hand and model the conversation that way.

The next step we can model is asking someone to play and turn taking. This can be done easily at the park or with toys. We can encourage our kids to ask “want to play?” if it looks like they are interested in playing with someone else. When using the swings or going down the slide, it’s a great opportunity to practice turn taking and waiting our turn. Some useful language could be “okay now it’s your turn, you can say “my turn”.

Simple games are a great way to teach turn taking such as hide and seek, giant connect 4, or blowing bubbles. For older children, board games and card games are great for building social skills.

When working on social skills with older children, think about conversational turn\ taking, looking for pauses in the conversation to know it’s your turn to speak, appropriateness of things being said, staying on topic, reading body language, and joining or exiting a conversation. Pragmatics/social skills are an important part of making and maintaining friendships. Speech therapy can be really helpful in making sure our kids feel confident to talk to their peers.

Author: Amber Drew, C-SLPA