“Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury. It is a necessity.” – Kay Redfield Jamison Play is vital for young children’s learning, and the main way in which language skills (and lots of other skills) develop. Through play, children make sense of the world, learn and use new vocabulary, […]
We have written a lot about how you can use everyday toys in speech therapy. You don’t need special resources to work on language and communication – with a bit of thought and planning, you can use the toys you have around the house or around your school or nursery. For more ideas about using […]
Today is DLD Awareness day. I’m sure there will be people reading this who don’t know what DLD is, and that’s why we need an awareness day! It stands for Developmental Language Disorder, and it is when children have a specific difficulty with language processing, which affects their understanding of what is said to them […]
Is your school taking part in No Pens Day Wednesday on 4th October? In case you haven’t heard of this, it is an initiative started by The Communication Trust which does just what it says on the tin – a whole day of teaching when no-one picks up a pen! This year will be the […]
“Where words fail, music speaks” – Hans Christian Andersen Songs are powerful – for many of us they evoke memories and express emotions. However, perhaps most of all, they can be fun! Children are no different. Many children love music and singing – and they usually don’t have the same inhibitions about doing it publicly […]
This week’s post is a guest post by my husband! Andrew got hearing aids for the first time in December 2015. Today he is going to share with us some of his experiences of the whole process. He uses a behind the ear hearing aid – Oticon Spirit Zest. Although he is an adult, and […]
Does your child find the “s” sound hard? This is the third in our series of posts about making specific speech sounds. You can read the post about teaching the “k” sound here and the post about teaching the “f” sound here. When should a child be able to say the “s” and “z” sounds? […]
I have been to some great training courses in person over the years that I have been a speech therapist. There is something really great about attending a course in person – you get totally immersed in the topic with no distractions, and you get to discuss the material with fellow attendees and with the […]
Being able to listen to what is being said to you is an important pre-cursor to language. Like most skills, this is one that develops over the early years of life from babies who can only focus on one thing for a few seconds to a child of 6-7 who can switch their attention between […]
The language of following instructions can be very confusing for young children. As Elizabeth explained in this post, when you give an instruction, very often a child does not actually need to understand all the words to follow it. In fact, sometimes they don’t really need to understand the words at all – they can […]
