Speech and language therapy does tend to involve practising something that you find difficult over and over again. No-one enjoys doing that! It is particularly difficult if you realise that it is something other people seem to manage effortlessly, but you really struggle with it. It’s so important that we support children’s self-esteem while they […]
Helen and I were thrilled when Sue O’Malley, Specialist Speech and Language Therapist offered to write a post about Semantic feature analysis. It isn’t something I have used ….yet, but it looks really useful and I will be trying this soon! You can find out more about Sue on her website www.chattertutor.co.uk. Here is her […]
It may still be November, but some of the schools I visit are already starting to practise their Christmas plays. So I thought I would write about how to make plays and assemblies more accessible for children with speech and language difficulties. Every child should be included; you might juts have to think laterally about a […]
I know not everyone likes fireworks and that the actual reason we celebrate Bonfire Night is tricky, so this post may not be for everyone. But I love this time of year, except the getting dark really early bit! There are so many different things happening that prove to be great opportunities for discussion with […]
When teaching a speech sound in therapy, there are a number of things therapists do to help support the child. Equally, when you are helping a child generalise a sound into their speech at home or in the classroom, there are ways to help as well. Today I’m going to talk about cueing. Now […]
Are you concerned about a child’s speech clarity? It might be your own child or a child you are working with. Have you noticed that they struggle to be understood? Do other children their age seem to speak much more clearly than they do? This post aims to give you 5 positive things to do […]
Helen and I love finding new games. It helps to keep the children motivated and it also means we don’t have to play pop up pirate 10 times a day! It can be tricky to find games for older children so I thought I would tell you about a few new finds. Wonky blocks This […]
When speech and language therapists assess younger children’s understanding of language, we often talk about “key words” or “information carrying words” – ICW’s. ICW’s is a term originally used by the Derbyshire Language Scheme, 1982, Knowles, W and Masidlover, M. What both of these terms refer to, are the number of words in a sentence […]
This is the fourth in our series of posts about teaching sounds. You can read the post about teaching the “k” sound here and the “f” sound here. A few weeks ago, Helen wrote about the “s” sound. As Helen explained, there are more common errors we hear with the “s” sound, but there are also […]
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 […]
