Activities for Language Development
Games & Activities for Language Development That Children Will Love!
The sweet babbling sounds our children make while testing out their first language skills are next-level cute, there’s no denying that! While we don’t want to wish away these precious moments, we do want to help provide you with useful tools for encouraging your child’s language development — all in fun and age-appropriate ways!
Kids thrive from experiences that wrap learning into play. This is as relevant for strengthening language as for any other major milestone, which is why integrating activities for language development into their day-to-day can make a world of difference. Games that stimulate language development offer valuable opportunities for bonding and learning, whether you're a parent looking to engage your little one at home or an educator researching how to promote language development in the classroom.
When activities and games geared towards learning language are easily accessible, children are more likely to practice new language skills often. Ultimately, this helps foster their language progression more naturally and effectively over time.
We know the list of tools that benefit our kids’ development can feel neverending and overwhelming, but we’re here to help lighten your load! We have put together our top go-to games and activities to help your child expand their language skills while having a great time! Use this guide whenever you need ideas for enjoyable and educational language development activities for 3-5-year-olds and even your older kiddos too!
10 Fun Games that Stimulate Language Learning in Children
So, let’s dive in and explore these oral language development activities! You can be sure that these games are carefully crafted to encourage fun and learning for your little one.
With each game, you’ll learn the recommended age, the number of players, how to play, and the skills a child will develop. From simple activities to promote language development in preschoolers to more advanced English language development activities for your older elementary-aged kids, you will find options across the spectrum for your family!
1. My Fun Day
If you’re trying to find activities for language development in preschoolers, this colorful wooden activity board is a perfect place to get started! Geared for ages three and up and ideal for 1-2 players, it’s designed to help children learn about topics like telling time, days of the week, months, weather, and seasons. Players can move the Night and Day Pawn to indicate the time of day and place the activity disks to show the day of the week and month, which helps build awareness of their world.
Using fun and engaging methods, My Fun Day helps children understand tough concepts related to time and how to verbalize them properly. Before you know it, they’ll be telling you their favorite season and asking for a later bedtime!
2. Share a Berry
This entertaining game is fun for all ages! Designed for kids ages three and up, it’s best when played with 2-4 players. It focuses on developing listening and speaking skills and numeracy and operations for a mathematical element. The goal is to follow Beary’s directions for adding berries to your string, either by sharing a berry or receiving one from another player. At the end of the game, the winner is determined by whoever collects the most berries!
A very, berry fun game of following directions and stringing berries, Share a Berry helps children develop language and fine motor skills. They may even feel inspired to go berry-picking in the wild afterward!
3. Color Huey & The Four Seasons
This 2-in-1 board game is a fan favorite when it comes to language development activities for preschoolers! Perfect for ages three and up and 2-5 players, it’s a great tool for helping kids learn colors and sight words. Featuring the likable caterpillar, Huey, players will match the color tokens to the color of his shoes on the board, and once all the colors are matched, it’ll be time to flip the board over and match their tokens to the correct word.
This clever and amusing game teaches children color recognition, matching skills, early reading skills, and vocabulary development. Soon enough, they’ll be sharing their favorite color — or trying to put shoes on caterpillars!
4. Wake Up Stars
This social-emotional learning (SEL) game has much to offer your little one. Meant for ages three and up and designed for 2-4 players, it helps children identify and understand their emotions by sharing stories. The game’s objective is simple: the winning player gets the most stars by identifying and sharing stories about emotions. Players will take turns spinning the spinner and moving the main character, Tibbar, around the star-filled board, identifying emotions whenever Tibbar stops on a star.
Players will learn storytelling, social relationship navigation, and emotional intelligence. Wake Up Stars and games like this are a great way to help your little ones identify and understand their emotions in a lighthearted way, all while strengthening their speaking and listening skills!
5. Lily Pond
A favorite for preschoolers, this 2-4 player game is perfect for ages four and up. Using adorable hopping frogs, Lily Pond helps instill foundational reading and spelling skills in your little ones. The idea is that players jump their frog pawns around the “pond.” If they land on or pass a lily pad with a letter that matches one from their word card, they collect that letter by placing their tracker on it. The objective is to be the first player to complete all three of their word cards and hop back to the center of the board to win the game.
As children look around the board to determine paths for moving their frogs to specific letters, it helps reinforce their sequencing and vocabulary acquisition abilities. It’s easy for kids to “hop” on board this fun and fulfilling game!
6. Clover Leap
This playful word game is a great next step in furthering language development for ages five and up and between 2-4 players. It combines fun and learning to help promote speaking and listening comprehension and foundational reading skills in young children. The way it works is: Players roll the dice to move their sheep or collect a clover tile. The words on the tiles are used to form silly sentences and earn the most points to win the game.
Clover Leap is a family favorite because it taps into everyone’s inner kid as they try to create funny phrasing. Kids simultaneously boost their creativity and language development by practicing sentence structure and vocabulary. Let the silliness ensue!
7. Alphabet Woods
Looking for the best kindergarten language development activities for little players exploring their ABCs? This game is it! Alphabet Woods is ideal for ages five and up and is best played with 2-5 players. It utilizes a majestic forest theme to promote alphabetizing and sequencing skills in children. The object of the game is to build trees, add and connect their branches, and collect forest animals along the way to win it all.
Kids enjoy the whimsical characters and magical setting in this imaginative game as they benefit from strengthening their patience and foundational reading skills. So, get ready to be whisked away into the beautiful world of this game!
8. Are We There Yet?
This portable game takes family road trips to another level! Its on-the-go format is geared for ages five and up and has no limit on how many people can play. It features a keyring with 50 activity cards, offering a variety of games and icebreakers that are fun for travelers of all ages. Card topics range from challenging players to speak in songs, create stories, and more. There is no real winner of this game, but feel free to make up your own rules if your family members thrive on friendly competition.
With a focus on communication, social interaction, and self-discovery, Are We There Yet keeps everyone entertained during long trips and is a wonderful way to stimulate imagination, creativity, and problem-solving.
9. Is or Isn’t
Dive into fantastical fun with this game for kids ages six and up and 2-5 players! Adorable creatures are leveraged to help your little ones advance their language foundation as they learn synonyms and antonyms. They take turns moving their character pawns around the gameboard and when they land on word cards or challenge spaces, they must identify the synonyms or antonyms on their bingo board and cover the squares with a token. The first player to complete a line of four tokens horizontally, vertically, or diagonally wins the game.
A clever and creative take on the classic Bingo game, Is or Isn’t is a prime example of turning educational lessons into fun-filled activities. Your kids will love getting lost in a world of adventure with these funny creatures as they race to the finish line.
10. Pickles’ Pig Tales
Give your kiddo the skill of storytelling! Best for ages six and up and 2-5 players, this game is a fabulous device to help your child build their storytelling and communication abilities. Players draw cards and take turns telling stories from the beginning and adding new sentences based on the object shown on the card drawn. Players look to collect cards by telling the story correctly from the start. The player with the most cards at the end of the game wins!
Pickles’ Pig Tales is a game the whole family can enjoy. It encourages thinking creatively and imaginatively while testing memory as players must pay attention to the story being told. Prepare for an onslaught of entertaining stories ahead!
Language Development Activities You Can Do At Home
Engaging in activities that promote language development at home can significantly help your child's cognitive, emotional, and social growth. Activities for language development can also help children:
- Become more expressive and confident in their communication skills
- Communicate with others in various social settings
- Develop positive relationships
- Show empathy towards others
- Express emotions effectively
- Resolve conflicts peacefully
The more children can engage in these types of activities, the more opportunities they’ll have to develop language skills without feeling like they’re being forced into an educational lesson. Look at some of our favorite language development activities you can do at home — or anywhere! — with your kids.
Tell Jokes
Encourage your child to learn and share jokes with family members or friends. Jokes are key to child development as they can help improve their vocabulary and hone their sense of humor. They also create opportunities for children to practice articulating words clearly and confidently. Building up a collection of jokes with your child can provide fun conversation starters, giving them more confidence when talking to others.
Challenge With Riddles
Riddles are awesome brain teasers that can stimulate critical thinking and problem-solving skills and enhance language development. Work with your child to solve riddles and motivate them to challenge family members and friends with their own riddles too! Riddles are a fun way to inspire creative and clever out-of-the-box thinking with your kids.
Play With Rhymes
Rhyming games are a playful way to help children develop phonemic awareness, which is crucial for reading and spelling. Encourage your child to identify rhyming words and develop their own rhymes for fun, all the while improving language skills and fostering creativity and imagination.
Encourage Storytelling
Storytelling can help improve vocabulary, sentence structure, narrative skills, imagination, and creativity. Give your child prompts or story starters to remove hesitation and inspire creative momentum with their stories. Providing your child the space to develop their storytelling abilities is a wonderful way to boost their language development. Plus, if you write them down, they make great future keepsakes!
Introduce Homonyms
Introducing homonyms — words that sound the same but have different meanings — can be a fun and educational language activity with children! Create a list of homonyms and use them in sentences to demonstrate their different meanings. This activity can help children expand their vocabulary and understand more nuances of their language.
Sing Songs
Singing songs is a delightful way to enhance language development. Because many songs contain repetitive lyrics and melodies, they can help children remember words and phrases and improve pronunciation and rhythm. So, unleash your inner songbird and belt it out with your kids for some entertaining — and potentially deafening — family fun!
Have a Laugh with Tongue Twisters
Tongue twisters are a silly, giggle-inducing way to improve pronunciation, articulation, and fluency. Challenge your kiddo with different tongue twisters to see how they tackle tricky phrases and laugh it off if either of you stumbles!
Support Language Development with SimplyFun
Engaging in educational games and activities can significantly impact your child’s language development and growth across the board. On top of advancing children’s language skills, games can also help foster other important abilities such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and social interaction. Interactive gameplay is a wonderful tool for motivating children to learn in fun and enjoyable ways, which is why we have created thoughtfully designed games and activities that entertain and educate kids of all ages.
Explore our activities for language development and other educational games and watch your child flourish! We strongly value educational growth for all children. That’s why we ensure all our games can be adapted for disabilities and learning challenges across the spectrum. So, wherever your child is on their developmental journey, you can find games that cater to their different levels and interests.
From games that focus on life and thinking skills to activities that encourage reading comprehension and language development, and good ol’ fun family board games, we have something for every child. Learning can — and should — be fun! So, take the leap and find your family’s new favorite developmental games today.
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