Flowerpot Game

‘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
•              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.