Raggedrobin - most of my ideas are led by dd1 - she sets the agenda!
Our postbox is from elc too - it's the wooden one and is great.
dd1 is fascinated by posting things, so we chose to incorporate this into our language expansion work. we obviously do other stuff too, but basically, we have loads of pictures of, well, anything you like.
we have sets of pictures of family, vehicles, dinosaurs, animals, actions, household objects, you name it, if you can get a picture of it/take a photo and laminate it, we have it - even photos of some of her toys.
to start with, we jsut gave dd1 each card, and simply named the object for her (she is a fantastic verbal imitator) and would not let her post the card (which she really wanted to do) until she had repeated what we said. once we knew that she knew what the picture was, we just held it up and waited for he to spontaneously name it. When she had achieved that (eg, we held a picture of a bus, and she said bus with no verbal prompt) we would add in another word that she had to copy befor eshe got to post the picture - red bus - and so on - big red bus, red bus with wheels, etc, etc. The key to this for dd1 is that she is desperate to post the pictures, and so she complies. Eventually, after a few repetitions, she klnows the word. we do make sure we get her to point out the object in books/on tv/in real life as well, though, so she does not just know it from her cards.
We tried to make sure there was always more than one example of an object, so that dd1 could start to generalise the names of things, and increasingly added in more (tabby cats, ginger cats, black and white cats, etc). Once she had generalised "cat", we started to play a matching game - put out 3 cards, a cat, a tree, and a bus. Gave her another picture of a cat (started with identical, then moved onto similar) and got hr to match the cat. Once she could match identical pictures, we got her to match pictures to objects/objects to pictures.
The list really is endless - this can go wherever you want to take it, depending on your dc's skills.
dd1 is endlessly fascinated with photos, so I have made up some laminated photo books of the family. there is so much to talk about (ie get her to repeat, and point out) that it is a long tie before each resource is exhausted. So we go through the book finding pictures of her brother/sister/dad. then get her to find the one with daddy wearing a blue shirt, or brown shoes, or where her sister is standing on grass/reading a book/talking on the phone, etc. this side of it helps her practise listening and scanning skills - once she knows the book quite well, I ask her to find things that are on different pages. she enjoys it, and it tests whether she is listening carefully!
Once simple voacb things have been mastered, you can move on to matching by category (things you eat, whih ones have feathers, what lives in the sea - again, anything you can think of which makes a set) or by pairs (bucket and spade, knife and fork, toast soldiers and boiled egg) so lay out eg an elephant, a knife and a fork, and ask which two go together (or which is the odd one - depends on your dc's level of understanding - dd1 can't do this type of thing yet)r lay out pictures of paint, eggs and cats, and ask which one you use to mak a picure, etc
Hope some of this makes sense - typing fast as my dinner is nearly ready! Pleasedo ask if it doesn't make any sense