Should you sign with your child? This is a something that I often get asked about. Often people want to focus on verbal language and think that signing with a child will hold their speech back. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth! Here are some of the reasons why signing can help a […]
I know that many parents worry about their child learning colour words. I do understand that many nurseries like a child to know their letters, numbers and colours. But as a speech and language therapist, checking if a child knows their colours is not the first thing on my list! I want to make sure […]
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 […]
We have written before about key words or information carrying words. You can read that post here. We talk about key words when we describe a younger child’s understanding of words. When we talk, ask questions and give instructions, there are usually clues around us that help children understand. So even if they aren’t sure of […]
Negatives are a really important thing to understand and always a high priority for me to target if a child is struggling with them. If you don’t know that there’s a difference between “push” and “don’t push” you can immediately see that it can lead to all sorts of problems! The first thing to do […]
We talk a lot here about how to communicate with toddlers, preschoolers and school-age children to help develop their language skills. However, the building blocks of language start developing right from the earliest days of a child’s life. Children understand language before they can use it, and even though most children are not saying words […]
We have written posts about teaching other early concepts – colour and prepositions. But today we are going to think about the early size concepts of big and little. Just before I start, there are a couple of points I want to run through. Firstly, there is the choice of words. Speech Therapists all tend […]
We have written about working your speech and language targets into normal, day to day activities before. You can read our tips for bath time, trips to the park and trips to the beach. So today, I am going to talk about working your targets into meal times. Now, if meal times are really hectic […]
Today’s blog post is a review of an e-book written by Alex Trichilo. Alex is an Australian speech and language therapist and has a fantastic blog called The SpeeL which you should definitely check out. It’s full of great ideas and advice for parents, teachers and speech and language therapists and has some lovely handouts […]
I speak to many parents of younger child who are worried about when those ‘first words’ will come. We are often asked when a child should start to talk and how many words they should have by what age. But it is really important to remember that communicating is much more than words. So before […]
