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Imitation Skills

Imitation is a prelinguistic skill. This means that it is a skill children learn prior to speaking at word-level 🗣

So how do we work on imitation skills?

We use a HIERARCHY. We start at imitation of ACTIONS and build up to imitation of WORDS or PHRASES.

Some actions we could work on include:
👋🏼 Waving hello/goodbye
👏🏼 Clapping

During play-based therapy, the Speech Pathologist will model a range of words to your child.

🚙 If we were playing with toy cards these could include:

👉🏼 Nouns: car, red car 🚗
👉🏼 Verbs: push, go/stop
👉🏼 Concepts: driving fast/slow

Here is a little snapshot of the Imitation cards I made to use with my Early Intervention kiddies 🙌🏼

Originally, these were printed for movement break cards, for my ZOOM clients but recently they have found a new purpose!

I have made all different action/challenge cards and here are a few ways I use them 👉🏼

🕺🏼 Wriggle break from ZOOM
👏🏼 Challenges
🗣 Imitation (copying)
🥳 Following instructions with different levels of complexity
➕ Loads more…

Super easy to make and my clients love them 🥰

Written by Emily Baxter

Blossom Rural Director & Speech Pathologist (B.SP, CPSP)

"As a Speech Pathologist, I love working with rural families on their child’s literacy, speech and language skills. I opened Blossom Rural in January 2021 after noticing the lack of Speech Pathology services in my local Far Western NSW region. The number of rural children, living on properties and remote towns, who were not able to access regular Speech Pathology intervention without driving to a major capital city, was astounding. These were the families I had always hoped to work alongside and provide an accessible service to. I grew up in Broken Hill before heading to Adelaide for Boarding School at 12 years of age followed by university. The healthcare gap between country and city was very obvious!"

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