The Child Struggles to Express Their Thoughts

If your child has clear speech by age 5, but you are only concerned that they cannot express their thoughts, games that help your child will be handy here.

In general, at an early age, parents are the primary source of information for the child, so they should be the ones to introduce them to the objects and concepts of the surrounding reality. However, forcing a child to think and express their thoughts correctly is impossible. You can only show how to convey your thoughts and feelings in words by your example.

When parents talk a lot with the child and with other people, the child naturally begins to speak more, imitating mom and dad.

Additionally, speech and complex thinking mechanisms are developed if the parents name words and explain their meanings. In addition to setting an example, parents can choose books and movies for the child, surround them with exciting things, and engage in activities that teach them to express their thoughts correctly through play.

The recommendations below provide examples of games that can be conducted at any convenient moment, whether during dinner preparation or on the way home from kindergarten.

Teaching children to express their thoughts is equally effective for 4-5-year-olds and 10-year-olds. Regardless of age, one should use playful learning methods to improve the ability to express ideas that arise in one's head. Below are some games that can be played at any convenient moment, such as during dinner preparation or on the way home from kindergarten.

This game aims to develop attentiveness, logic, and abstract thinking. An adult offers the child any two objects, and they take turns naming their standard features. Initially, you can take objects from the same category, such as a lemon and a banana (both fruits, edible, yellow, etc.), then gradually complicate the initial data, such as candy and a cup. At first glance, these items have nothing in common, but if you think about it, you can recall that they are both made by humans, related to food, have surfaces covered with paint, their names end with the same letters, etc.

The native language has a rich vocabulary so that the same thought can be expressed differently. In a specific situation, simple options come to mind first, but each new option is usually more complex than the previous one. For example, a child tells their mom, "I am hungry." The mom should ask them to say this phrase in different words. The child might come up with variations like: "When are we going to eat?", "Mom, when will you invite us to the table?" "Usually, we have dinner at this time. Let's not break this tradition." Let the child come up with at least 4-5 options.

For this game, you must prepare cards with images in advance. The cards are laid out in front of the child face down and shuffled. The child takes a card, carefully examines the picture, and develops a sentence logically connected to the previous ones—the more complex the sentence, the better. For example, cards with a bench, a crow, a girl, and a cloud came up. With these words, you can create a story like: "In an old overgrown park, far from the main paths, there was an old bench. No one had sat on it for a long time, and only the crow living on the mighty oak nearby occasionally flew past. One evening, a little scared girl wandered into this remote part of the park. As soon as she sat on the bench, a big gray cloud appeared high in the sky, and it started to rain..."

The task of the game is to make a sentence from random words and phrases. Words can be chosen by randomly pointing at any book on an open page or coming up with them for each other. For example, "forest, flock of birds, tall linden, boy" came up. You can make sentences like:

Specialist Contact:
Yulia Machus
Speech Therapist
@julia_machus