How to Teach Your Child During Play

As your child gets more comfortable playing with you (Read “How to motivate your child to play with you”), you can slowly introduce new challenges, turning play into an exciting learning adventure!

Discover how play can enhance your child's development by exploring the skills they can build through interactive activities. Click the links below to access video tutorials that demonstrate evidence-based strategies for teaching pivotal skills such as joint attention, imitation, requesting, and behavioral flexibility that are essential for promoting your child's overall learning and growth.

Social Skills Development

Joint attention and imitation can help children foster better interactions with peers in social environments.

Joint Attention teaches children to share attention with others through eye-gazing or pointing, which facilitates effective communication and social interactions. To increase joint attention, build anticipation by creating a scenario where your child expects something fun, and pause the play before giving it to them. See if they look at you first. When they do, reinforce this behavior with specific praise (e.g., "I love that you looked at me!") or by allowing them access to a favorite item (e.g., giving them the Jack-in-the-Box) 

Watch how to enhance your child’s Joint Attention during play.

Imitation helps your child learn to observe others and replicate their actions, making it easier for them to acquire new skills from others in the future. You can teach imitation in a variety of ways, by modeling the behavior you want and then prompting your child to copy it immediately. Incorporate imitation naturally during activities like singing, dancing, or playing. For example, while singing "If You're Happy and You Know It," you can clap your hands and encourage your child to follow along. During playtime, you might roll a ball and ask your child to do the same.

You can also use more structured approaches to teach specific actions, like showing how to build a simple block tower and encouraging them to replicate it, or modeling how to stir pretend food in a bowl during pretend play. You can offer prompts by gently guiding their hands to complete the action and then gradually reducing the assistance to encourage independent learning over time.

Watch how to enhance your child’s Imitation Skills during play.

Learning to Request

Some of the first words that children use are usually requests (e.g., ‘mom’, ‘up’ or ‘milk’). These are the first steps of language development. Learning to request empowers the child to improve and control his/her environment.

Let’s add on to what you learnt above about Joint Attention to teach your child how to request. When you create anticipation opportunities during play and pause before giving them the ‘fun’, you create an opportunity where your child can learn to ask or point to the preferred item, a.k.a ‘fun’. For example, when playing ‘tickle my belly’, you can pause right before tickling his/her belly, and then wait to see if your child requests for ‘tickles’. If the child requests vocally (e.g., ‘tickles’) or non-vocally (e.g., pats his belly), give them the tickles immediately. If they don't, you can prompt them to say the word or pat their belly (using the imitation skills we discussed above). Consistently practice both vocal and non-vocal requests during play sessions to strengthen communication skills.

Non-vocal requests help your child learn to communicate by pointing (i.e., using their index finger) when they can’t yet speak or don't know the words for what they want. Pointing can also help them make choices when you show them two or more options. Teaching this skill can reduce frustration and behaviors like tantrums when they’re struggling to ask for something. You can help teach pointing by gently guiding their finger to point at what they want and, over time, gradually fade your assistance so that they can do it on their own.

Watch this video on teaching pointing to request

Vocal requests (Mand) teach your child to use words to ask for preferred items or activities. When teaching vocal requests early on in development, the adult should associate a specific word with the desired item (e.g., teaching "cake" for cake, rather than "give"). The words chosen should be clear and useful for the child to help them understand the direct connection between the word and the outcome. It's important to choose words that match the child's developmental level and current vocabulary. Start with simple, one-word requests for items they are motivated to get, such as "juice" or "ball," and gradually expand to two or more words to build vocabulary and complexity (i.e. “drink juice”, “give big ball”). When prompting a word (e.g., "cake"), the adult can gradually fade the prompt (e.g., starting with "ca" and moving to “c”) so that the child eventually makes the request independently, without any assistance.

Pretend Play

Encourage imagination and creativity in your child by assigning roles to inanimate objects or people, or adding your own creative variations during play. You can know if your child is enjoying it, by looking out for indicating responses (see post: “how to motivate your child to play with you”)

When teaching skills during play, it is paramount that the child receives reinforcement immediately after engaging in the appropriate behavior. Reinforcers can be social praise and/or access to tangible items/activities.

When prompting, ensure that the magnitude and intensity of prompt is slowly reduced to facilitate independent learning of skills.

To learn more about identifying reinforces and fading prompts see previous posts on ‘Identify Reinforcers’ and ‘Prompt and Reinforcer fading’.