Posted to communicative@listbot.com a parent, Diane (Dibs4444@aol.com) -- 
One of the things that the speech teacher talked about was using scripts. You have a toy like Mr. Potato Head, for example. Basically, if you want to teach words or phrases or conversation, you can start by making a list of core words that you want the child to use. Then all folk coming into the home can use that list in their play. You can use this for anything...pronouns, prepositions, concepts, etc. I do think the repeating helps.
So for Mr. Potato Head you take the body with no parts and roll him across the table. You say "UH OH, Look no feet! He forgot his feet! He needs feet to walk. Better put on your feet." Now you put something wrong for the feet and say, "NO NO Mr. Potato Head, that is not your feet! He needs HELP. He is so funny. Better help him....Put feet on...Now he has feet, Now he can walk." So right here you have the words repeated of FEET, HELP, WALK, etc. And so you go onto all the body parts of oh, he can't hear me, he has no ears! He can't smell a flower (have a flower) he has no nose, etc.
What happens ideally is that the child learns the script and also the words. First it is rote and then you use the words in all contexts and situations. One of the things that the floortime psychologist recommends is to generalize right from the start. Like if you are teaching body parts....show a real arm, show a comic book arm picture, show a picture of a real arm, show a baby doll arm, show a teddy bear arm, so that the child is not concrete. The main thing is to get the child to be in the abstract. Anything that is not the real object is going towards the abstract. Verbal words are probably the most abstract that you can get...That is what we are working on here...