The first week of January, is a good time to reflect on the past year and an excellent time to work on language skills. A fun activity for you and your family is to make a time capsule for the year 2013. You can use a snack tube (Pringles container) or jar and choose any items you want to decorate the outside of it. While decorating your container, make sure you talk about what decorations you are using and why. To fill the inside, you can use family photos, tickets from trips, memorabilia, or anything else that can symbolize events from the past year. This is a great time to work on summarizing and sequencing as well as using the past tense. You can choose to compare different family trips/events and work on wh-questions. For younger children or those who need picture support to be able to answer questions and tell about events, be sure to use photographs. Then, you can also talk about any other things you see in the background of the photos. Since the end of one year is the beginning of another, you can also ask the child to make predictions about what the family will do in the upcoming year.
Have a Happy New Year!