‘Designed to develop counting and colour recognition skills; observation and social skills; strategic thinking’
In a speech and language therapy session, or when you are playing with your child at home, these specific areas can be addressed.
Attention
- Children will have to be patient if their flower ‘blooms’ too soon as they have to wait for other players to try and grow the tallest flower.
- Longer waiting times could be engineered by tweaking the rules of the game; for example, assigning a specific colour to each player so that they can only pick a card when their allocated colour is rolled on the dice.
Language
- Modelling specific quantitative vocabulary instead of just using numbers to count
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- e.g. a single leaf, a couple of leaves, a few leaves
- Encouraging specific grammar usage
- e.g. comparatives: “That flower is taller / shorter”, superlatives: “Who has the tallest flower?”, “Who has the most leaves?”.
- A fun add-on to the game for children. Let them ‘grow’ taller stalks using a torch and water spray bottle to represent sunlight and water respectively. This encourages higher level language reasoning abilities, for example, asking “How / why can the flower grow better?” and “What might happen if it’s too hot and dry?” etc.
Speech clarity
- This game lends itself to addressing more complex ‘cluster’ speech sounds like ‘flower’, ‘grow’ ‘bloom’. Some children may have difficulties with this up till the age of about 5 to 6 years old.
- Hearing adult models and practising saying these themselves in a repetitive and fun context is supportive towards their speech production skills.
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