Language abilities are essential to communication and thus, our connections with others. Deficits often result in withdrawal and can range from forgetting the meaning of words or phrases to not being able to communicate with words at all - spoken, read or written.
The following activities are examples of exercises caregivers can use to engage clients' language abilities.
In the Rhyming activity, clients are prompted to match items from the left column with their rhyming counterparts in the right column. For example, in the picture to the right, phone would be matched with bone. Even if clients cannot identify the rhyming objects immediately, they exercise the language domain by merely identifying and describing each object.
Categorical Scrambles is an example of a more challenging language activity. The client is asked to decode a series of scrambled words. As an added challenge, he or she is then prompted to identify the word that does not fit within the specified category. For example, if we unscramble the choices under "Seasons" on the right, we get "summer", "fall", "spring", "winter" and "valley", and can be identify that "valley" is the word that does not belong.
The language activities range in difficulty and some can be quite challenging. We designed the activities to prompt thought and discussion around the task so the language domain is activated, whether or not the client the problems correctly.