YouTube - teaching through video in less than 5 minute ‘bites’!
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Video is the perfect medium to teach parents and education staff signs to use with children to help their communication development. Many of the signs we use to help can be found on YouTube:
Makaton- Their YouTube channel has videos of their signs of the week to keep your skills fresh (see ‘signing’ blog post for more information about using signs to support language development)
Cued articulation is often used with children with speech sound difficulties. If your child is using this in therapy sessions, you might like to look up the signs on YouTube to remind yourself how to make them. Jane Passy explains about Cued Articulation here
Songs and Rhymes
Toddlers and pre-school children will get the most out of the videos when you watch and join in with them. YouTube is a huge library of action songs and videos, so if your child comes home from nursery singing ‘dingle dangle scarecrow’ you can learn how to join in with them here.
Singing hands sing and sign lots of popular nursery rhymes and songs if you need inspiration for a new song to share with your child visit them.
Our article ‘make time to rhyme and sing’ has tips on how you can make the most of rhyme time to boost your child’s communication skills.
Think back to the way you first learnt the alphabet, or the colours of the rainbow – does a song or a rhyme pop into your head? Calvert (2009) found that songs improved adults and children’s memory of content presented in a song compared to when the information was spoken. Videos that are engaging to children may make them more likely to want to hear the content again and again (helping them to learn it), and you can find a number of YouTube videos with songs or rhymes about anything your child may need to practice, such as…
Opposites :
Check out this video on opposites
The same study also found that it is important to check your child’s understanding of information learnt through song, and talk about it together in different activities and situations, so if you learn about opposites using those songs, you could then practice sorting toy animals into big vs small animals, or talk about big and small when you are sorting out the washing.
Speech
Young children practicing a sound might benefit from these videos from Ring Card phonics (plus they give adults some handy examples of words beginning with target sounds they can then use in games):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLKJ0DiCHP8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfVj02U04LE
Songs that have lots of your child’s target sound can also be good to listen to, for example if your child is learning the ‘f’ sound then this ‘fee fi fo fum’ song from Jack and the Beanstalk would be good listening practice! http://www.songsforteaching.com/speechtherapy/ has more examples of songs you could look up on YouTube containing a whole range of different speech sounds.
‘Shorts’
Pixar, Disney, and a few of the other animation companies have produced ‘shorts’ which are beautifully animated, often wordless video stories. These are great for working on language and social communication targets with school-aged children. Two of my favourites are:
These can be used in a whole range of ways:
- Pause the story and guess what might happen next
- Your child could provide a ‘voiceover’ to the story, or dialogue for the characters
- The characters are full of personality, so provide a good opportunity to practice descriptive language when describing the characters
- Talk about the emotions in the story
- Suggest an alternative ending for the story
- Summarise the ‘moral’ of the story
Social skills
YouTube has cartoons and stories designed to teach children desired social behaviours, either explicitly:
Or through suggestion:
‘My no no no day’, teaching that some days you might feel tired, sad and grumpy, but the next day you might feel better again!
YouTube is a massive resources, and these examples just skim the surface. Please share with us via social media and tag us @Iris_Speaks with the hashtag #YTSLT your top YouTube videos for developing communication skills. Remember, your child will get the most out of any videos when you join in watching with them, and talk about the videos together.
Please check all external content, including YouTube videos, before using these with your child. Whilst these videos were approved at the time of writing this post, content on YouTube and links may change. Inclusion in this blog does not imply endorsement of the creator or poster of the videos. YouTube contains adds prior to videos which may not be suitable for your child to watch.
Written by Alys Mathers, Speech and Language Therapist
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