13/08/2025
🌟 Supporting Your Child’s Thinking and Talking 🌟
Here’s an activity you can try at home to help develop your child’s verbal reasoning, inference, and higher-level language skills. Children take turns rolling a dice and answering a question based on what they can see. These questions have been chosen to encourage them to think deeply and explain their ideas out loud.
🧠 Try asking open-ended questions such as:
• “Why do you think X happened?”
• “How is this person feeling?”
• “What might they say or do next?”
• “What could we do to fix this?”
• “What might they be thinking?”
These types of questions help children to:
✅ Make predictions
✅ Solve problems
✅ Take on the perspective of others
✅ Develop inference skills (reading between the lines)
✅ Look for clues that give us more information
✅ Use spoken language to justify their ideas
✅ Give reasons for their answers
This supports important language and thinking skills that are vital for learning, storytelling, problem-solving, and socialising.
🔍 In schools, resources like 'Language for Thinking' or 'Mr Goodguess' are recommended to support this kind of work, but you don’t need this to get started, you can use a picture book, encourage your child to look at the first page and predict what the story might be about, then ask them questions as you go through.
🙏Thank you to Aimee, one of our amazing SLT's, for this great resource!
For more information on the above you can watch our video on 'blank levels' here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rONQx6FmxCLzt62kYf6ESPt_ioWlyfZm/view?usp=sharing
