A simple trip to the grocery store provides an endless source of topics to discuss. Here are a few ways to support speech and language while grocery shopping:
-Practice descriptive language. Describe the foods you see (e.g., What does that bin of apples look like?, What does the cereal box look like?, describe the bag of animal crackers, etc.).
-Practice categories. For example, you may ask, “How can we find breakfast bars, would they be with the hamburgers or the cereal?” or “We need ice cream, what part of the store do you think that will be in?”.
-Practice prepositions. At the grocery store you can create a fun “find it” challenge by using prepositional phrases to help kids correctly identify an item in a particular place on a shelf (e.g., “The item you’re looking for is between the canned corn and canned beans.” and”The cereal you’re looking for is on the second shelf next to the granola bars.”).
-Practice following directions. The directions can be as simple as, “Please get 2 boxes of crackers off the shelf” or more complex, “Please get 3 boxes of mac and cheese, put them in the cart and then point to the kind of cookies you would like me to get.”
-Complete a sound Search. Focus on specific sounds by assigning each child a sound and see how many things they can find in the grocery store that begin with that sound.
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