Sometimes, children with speech sound difficulties tend to give slightly less eye contact. This means that they don’t look as much at other people when they are talking. This is not always the case, but I have often had parents comment on it. Certainly, when I am doing speech sound therapy, I spend a lot […]
Phonological awareness can be defined as the ability to explicitly access and manipulate the sound structure of spoken words – Hatcher, Duff and Hulme, Sound Linkage, 2014 So, what on earth does that mean?! It’s probably easiest to explain it by talking about some of the skills that are involved in phonological awareness. These include:- […]
Our recent posts on speech sound development and the speech therapy process have proved popular. Speech and Language Therapists tend to use specific terminology when we describe a child’s speech. Although we all know what we mean by this, it isn’t clear to non speech therapists! We aren’t expecting you to be an expert. We […]
We have reviewed Lucy’s lovely books before. You can read our previous review here. Lucy is a speech and language therapist who not only finds the time to make resources, but also writes a fantastic blog. If you haven’t read her posts we definitely recommend you go and have a look. Her site is Lucy […]
Helen’s post last week talked about which sounds your child should be saying and when. If you haven’t seen that post you can read it here. So today, I am going to talk about what we actually do to help a child make and use those sounds. Before I start, please remember if you are concerned […]
I’ll be honest – we’ve been putting off writing this post. Speech sounds are something we work with all day every day and we are constantly making judgements about whether a child’s speech clarity is within the average range or not. However, it’s difficult to summarize it in a post like this. I know it’s […]
We published the first part of this post earlier in the week and it has been really popular. In case you missed it, you can check it out here. Here are some more ideas of games to play to practise speech sounds. Firstly, some children really don’t like looking at picture cards. Our first set […]
Well, maybe not quite 101, but lots!… If your child or a child you are working with is having speech sound therapy, it won’t take you long to realise that there is a lot of repetitive practise involved! It’s very likely that at some point you’ll be given a set of pictures or a particular […]
Many children I work with are very confident communicators even though their speech is not clear or they struggle to get across what they want to say. This is great to see and helps to reduce their frustration. For some children however, the speech or language problem has a real knock-on impact on their confidence […]
Our next column on the brilliant Special Needs Jungle website is up now. The topic is how to communicate succesfully with children with unclear speech and you can check it out here. Do let us know what you think, either here or there. Also, if you missed our last column about the impact of language […]
