AD Disclaimer: contains gift items sent for review.
It’s December which means it’s time for christmas gift guides! This year, my gift guide will centre around toys and books which can help with speech and communication as this has obviously been a big focus of ours over the past few years! This is also part of a series I am sharing on tiktok so you can watch the video of this post too! So I’ve rounded up my top christmas gifts for a child with speech delay this christmas (and what each gift can help with). All of these toys we have tried ourselves and found really helpful in supporting speech therapy and helping my son’s speech development.
1. Lovevery Play Kits
Best for: expanding your child’s play skills
Lovevery are age-specific play kits which offer really great value and cover all kinds of different play. You purchase the kit based on your child’s age in months (each kit usually covers a few months of ages) and it’s designed to cover a variety of different types of play, such as imaginary play and things like counting and reading. Each box also comes with a play guide to help you get the most out of the kit and how it links to age milestones (but these are presented as things your child ‘may’ be doing rather than feeling prescriptive). If you sometimes feel stuck on how to play with your child, I’d really recommend these kits and one kit includes so many different toys that are really built to last. You can find my full lovevery play kit review here.
2. Funics Subscription Box
Best for: helping with speech sound practice
Many children struggle with speech sounds (like Jude does) and work on this alongside general speech therapy to improve their language skills. We have been doing phonics speech therapy for several months now-which requires learning the phonics sounds for different letters and playing activities to encourage practising them. So this funics subscription box is perfect! It includes a specific phonics focus (so ours was the first stage sounds of SATPIN) and a range of different activities you can do with them. Included were the letters themselves, flash cards, colouring sheets, playdough and a balancing game. Simply scan the QR code to be shown a video guide of how to use these with your child to help phonics practice-genius!
3. Yoto mini Player
Best for: screen free fun
We have both a yoto and toniebox but the yoto mini is our current favourite! You can read our full review here but we there is so much that you can do with the box to help with speech delay. I love how the audio leaves spaces for your child to interact and join in and they even have phonics cards to help practice and expose your child to speech sounds.
4. Alphablocks Phonics Fun
Best for: phonics practice/helping with things like final consonant deletion
We love Alphablocks (I’d also really recommend their reading program which I bought to do over the summer holidays. Alphablocks is another great resource for phonics and this game is perfect to help your child sound out the whole word. There’s four different games zones, such as let’s sing and word magic. It’s great for teaching spelling but as you add each letter to the game to spell out the word, it sounds out each individual phonics sound-which is really helpful if your child is missing the start or end off words.
5. Our House
Best for: general vocabulary.
We purchased this Our House game in an Amazon sale so it was really inexpensive. It’s quite basic but it is fun to teach the different rooms in the house and the different objects you’ll find there, it’s just a case of sticking the items on to the room to match their outline. There’s no words so you’ll need to do the labelling for them.
6. Learning Resources Answer Buzzers
Best for: introducing words
So the idea of these is to use them for family games where you have to press the button to answer, but I thought they could also be really good to expose your child to learn new words-or even teaching things like yes or no? Each buzzer holds up to seven seconds and you simply tap the button to record your sound. You can use this as a really simple introduction to an AAC device-for example each buzzer could have the word for a different snack on and they simply select which one they’d like?
7. Playfoam Sand and Sensory Set
Best for: teaching verbs and sensory play
As well as being a great sensory activity, this sensory set is great for teaching verbs and working on fine motor strength. It comes with playfoam sand (which amazingly never dries out) and fine motor tools such as scissors, stamper and roller. These tools are great for learning new verbs (Which are really crucial to build sentences) such as cut, stamp, roll and squash-and we have created a seperate symbols section of these on our AAC device. The playfoam sand has a slightly different texture to playdough. We use this alongside the dough disco videos on youtube which are great for fine motor skills.
8. The sound we found book
Best for: pre-verbal sounds/sound practice
Yep I’ve mentioned this before but it’s such a great gift! This book was recommended by my speech therapist. It’s a storybook specifically created by a team of speech therapists to introduce more sounds and reinforce them. The illustrations aren’t as jazzy as some books but it really encourages you to slow down each sound you make and to encourage those initial sounds (or refine the ones they have so they are more accurate).
9. Orchard Toys Post Box Game
Best for: encouraging turn taking
This lovely letterbox game is really great for introducing turn-taking and encouraging your little one to take turns with you or a sibling to post the letters. We take a letter each and I hold some back to encourage him to let me take turns and ask for one.
It’s a really simple little game but it’s perfect for introducing colours too; since your little one will eventually learn to match the letters to the coloured letterboxes (yellow, green, red and blue). I’ve mentioned this game so many times but it really is a winner and we still use it now.
Another great orchard game is greedy gorllia-it’s great for teaching images and words around food items.
10. First 100 Christmas Words
Best for: christmas vocabulary
I’ve just ordered this for us so thought I’d give it a mention. I love the books in their first 100 word series so this christmas one is perfect to introduce christmas vocabulary.
11. Peppa’s 1000 Word Sticker Book
Best for: increasing vocabulary
The Peppa 1000 word sticker book will keep them entertained forever and is so great
12. Gakken workbooks
Best for: building action words and general vocab
These Gakken workbooks are absolutely brilliant for playing together and promoting speech. There’s a mix of sticker activities (like dressing the doll); labelling activities; pen skills and lots have talking points/questions on each page. There’s quite a few different ones in the series and they’re reasonably priced.
13. You Choose
Best for: open ended questions and encouraging more conversation.
This book is great for children who are starting to be more conversational and being able to pick out different things on the page.. Each page is designed to get the conversation flowing with questions like: ‘if you could eat anything, what would you eat?’ with hundreds of illustrations on each page. It’s perfect for slightly older children to build their imagination and conversation skills!
14. Let’s Pretend Puzzle Books
Best for: imaginary play and vocabulary
We have almost all these Let’s Pretend puzzle books. They’re great to get your child to engage and be more active during the reading process and you can also use the pieces for imaginary play too.
15. Talking Flashcards
This little device is a great alternative to flashcards and can be used for independent play too. Simply insert the flashcard into the device to hear the word being repeated-it’s great for children to take ownership and select and insert their own flashcards.
16.Toddler flashcards
We purchased this a while back and have had lots of use out of the set! It consists of 105 uniquely designed double sided flash cards featuring letters of the colors, number, shapes, body parts, animals, abc letters & sight words.
What I think is also great is on the reverse side are prompting questions such as Can you cover your right eye? What do you think of when you see a cow?
Tots playtime box
Tot’s Playtime Box is just what you need to make preschool learning fun! A box full of fun activities that help your child learn, delivered straight to your door each month-we subscrive each month. Included are a craft activity, messy play, activity booklet (with stickers!) and more.
Plus Tot’s Playtime Box is backed by a Speech and Language Therapist and ‘Talking Tips’ are also included with all activities to encourage children’s speech, vocabulary, and communication.
Choose between the monthly subscription to receive a new themed box each month or purchase a one-time box or gift subscription via the shop.