Blog Series: The Importance of Play Post #2: Blocks & Babies

Welcome back to my Blog Series: The Importance of Play. If you haven’t read my first post in this series: Play and Language Milestones, I suggest you check it out before reading this one. Now that I have given you all a little bit of background about the development of play and language skills, I would love to talk to you about some of my favorite toys for play and language development. I get asked frequently about what toys parents should buy for their children. And when you are standing on the toy aisle, I encourage everyone to think about what will promote the most imagination from your child and what toy can be used in many different ways.

Two of my favorite toys (and your child may already own them) are Blocks & Babies. The possibilities are endless for ways to play with these and the language skills that you can facilitate by using these toys. I also love these toys because they are two that can be enjoyed from a very early age and for many years to come. Here are some ideas of how to use Blocks & Babies to promote play and language development during the first 2 years.

I'm going to continue to use the Westby Play Scale to outline skills are various ages for you to more easily follow along with my suggestions.

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Phase 1: Presymbolic
Presymbolic Level 1: 8-12 months
Play:

• Awareness of object when not seen (Ex: finds toy hidden under scarf)
  • Put a block in a box and set the lid on top. Your child will enjoy taking the lid off and discovering the block. They will also enjoy “waking up” the baby that is napping under a blanket.
• Means-end behavior: crawls to get toy.
  • Stack up a small tower of blocks. This will likely entice your child to crawl to you and engage in your play, likely by knocking over the tower.
• Uses some toys appropriately, doesn’t mouth all toys.

Language:

• No true language, but makes requests and commands.
  • During this time, you can begin to encourage your child to vocalize, sign, or verbalize to request. This is a good time to model signs and words such as “more”, “up”, “down”, “boom”, “baby”, etc. These words also include sounds that your child may already be producing such as /b/, /m/, /p/, or /d/.

Presymbolic Level 2: 13-17 months
Play:

• Purposeful exploration of toys.
  • Your child may begin to attempt to stack blocks or even build single level structures, like fences, by lining up blocks.
• Hands toy to adult if unable to operate.
  • As your child tries to learn how to build with blocks, begin to encourage them by helping them hand-over-hand to build or even offering them an open hand. This helps children learn to initiate requesting help.

Language:

• Makes commands, requests, protests, labels, responds, greets.
  • As your child’s various uses for language continues to expand, remember to give them TIME (showing them that you are patiently and expectantly waiting) for them to initiate their own requests, respond to you, or tell you about what they are seeing/doing. Along the way, try to model language at their level, rather than asking questions (i.e. Mom: “Big block” Child “Little block”) to stimulate language. Vocabulary to model includes: Greeting (Hello, Hey), Protest/Reject (Stop, No), Request Assistance/Action or Object (Help, Can you/Open, Do)

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Phase 2: Symbolic
Symbolic Level 1: 17-19 months 
Play:

• ​Autosymbolic- pretends to sleep, eat, drink from empty cup. Uses most objects appropriately, tool use (uses stick to get toy), finds toys invisibly hidden.
  • Your child will likely become more interested in the baby doll at this point. This is a great time to model daily activities on the baby doll, like feeding it or putting it to sleep. Your child is beginning to pretend to sleep and feed themselves, so they will start to draw the connection.
• Uses most objects appropriately, tool use (uses stick to get toy), finds toys invisibly hidden.
  • In this stage you will see your child learning appropriate object use. This means, they may begin stacking blocks and treating their baby doll like a person. Your child will also begin to find toys that are out of sight. At night the toys are cleaned up and put in their place and your child’s developing play skills will allow them to find a specific toy the next morning without even seeing it.​

Language:

• ​Beginning of true communication: functional and semantic relations- recurrence, existence, nonexistence, rejections, denial, agent, object, action/state, location.
  • Their vocabulary is continuing to grow and expand at this point. Words that you may be hearing from your child (and modeling for them to learn too) include: recurrence (More, Again), existence (Look, There), nonexistence (None, Gone), rejections/denial (All done, No), agent (Boy, Mommy), object (Block, Doll), action (Go, Come, Up), state (Away, All gone, Dirty), location (In, Up).​

Symbolic Level 2: 19-22 months 
Play:

• ​Symbolic play extends beyond the child’s self. Plays with dolls (feeding, hair brushing), child pretends to be active with more than one person (feeds baby, himself, and mommy), combines two toys (pours tea from pot into cup).
  • ​Now that your child wants to play pretend with the baby, consider drawing their attention to your daily activities, even alternating carrying out activities with your child and then the baby (i.e. giving your child a drink from a cup, then the baby gets a “drink” from a cup too).

Language:

• ​Refers to people/objects when not present.
  • When mommy or daddy leaves for work, that is a great time to describe what’s happening (i.e. “Daddy drives the car” and “Mommy’s working.”)
• Beginning of word combinations: agent-action, agent-object, action-object, attributive, dative, action-locative, object-locative, possessive.
  • As you play with your child, their use of language and their word combinations will continue to expand. This is a great time to use your daily routines and play with them to teach them new concepts, like: locations, actions, and agents. Try to make the new words you teach them stand out. Modeling single concepts at a time is also very helpful. While playing with blocks, try to show pick one locative (i.e. “under”) and see if the two of you can find all the ways to make the block(s) be “under”.​
  • Here are some examples of the types of language your child may begin using at this age: agent-action (I jump, Daddy go), agent-object (Mommy’s car, My ball), action-object (Ball roll, car drive), attributive (Old, dirty), dative (Give to me), action-locative (Go under, walk on), object-locative (Ball over, sock on), possessive (Mine, yours).

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Symbolic Level 3: 2 years
Play:

• ​Represents daily experiences (plays house), events or short and isolated, no true sequencing, events short isolated- no true sequencing, block play is build up/ knock down.
  • Now you may see your child starting to carry out more than one action with their doll. They begin to think about their daily life and relate multiple actions to the doll (i.e. Put baby in shopping cart and feed the baby). This is a great time to continue modeling sequences for your child. Think about putting a bib on your child and their doll, feed your child and put the spoon to the baby’s mouth too, and wipe the face of your child and the baby. Now your child may be able to build their own tower of blocks to knock down too.

Language:

• ​Uses all of the above in short phrases/sentences. Use morphological markers such as: possessives, plurals, present progressive and can answer Wh- questions.
  • You will start to see your child forming sentences, noticing the difference between “mommy’s cup” and “my cup” and verbally telling you about it. This language leap is huge! Your child will not only be showing off their large vocabulary using whole sentences, but they will also start answering many of your questions. Continue to help them by modeling for them.​​
    

Play and Language growth are so important for your child’s overall development! I hope you picked up some tips on how to use Block & Babies during the early years can be used to stimulate your child’s play and language. These are really two perfect toys for expanding your child’s play and language skills. Not to mention that they are toys your child will benefit from for years! Make sure to look out for my next post in this Blog Series: The Importance of Play. Post #3 will talk about MORE about Blocks & Babies and how to use these simple toys to stimulate play and language development beyond 2 years of age.

If you would like more information about Play & Language, would like updates on new blog posts or have more questions about speech and language development, Contact Black Oak Therapy.