By: Preschool Teachers
Understanding language is important for a child to communicate successfully with others. Reading, writing, and oral language skills are all about words. Introducing the child to opposites not only increases vocabulary, but it is a fun activity that forces the child to use higher-order thinking skills thereby building his/her intelligence.
For a child to use words and concepts in their vocabulary, they first need to understand them. Understanding the concept of opposites is important as it helps a child to learn how to compare two different things and to develop a more concrete understanding of a specific concept (e.g. hard vs soft). Learning opposites also improves a child’s ability to describe things.
We use the pictures attached to teach the students about opposites. Using pictures that illustrate opposites gives the child a visual understanding of the words introduced. In this lesson, we review opposite words about prepositions (in front of VS behind, beside VS between). Besides using pictures, we also use music as an additional tool to make learning opposite concepts more entertaining. We sing and dance together while following the opposite song. Through exciting music, students tend to give more attention to the screen, thus it can help them to understand the concept well.
Source:
https://childdevelopment.com.au/images/Resources/SLP_games_and_activities/Opposites.PDF
https://www.montessoriplus.com/blog-1/why-teach-opposites
