A review of Playing games with…..s by Lucy Sanctuary

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 Sanctuary

Lucy’s latest resource is called “Playing Games with s”.  As you can probably guess it a set of games to support the ‘s’ sound!  It is aimed at children who can use the sound in words already and who need further practise to help the sound generalise to their spontaneous speech.  As such it often combines ‘s’ in all positions in words in the activities.

Lucy very kindly sent us a copy of the book, but the review and thoughts are our own.

The resource is published by Stass and comes with a CD containing copies of all the hand drawn colour images provided in the book.  It is 35 pages long and contains 15 different games for generalising the ‘s’ sound.  It also has some lovely certificates to give to the child after therapy and a really useful self rating scale to help the child’s awareness of their speech.  Playing games with ‘s’ is currently available for £25.00 plus p+p.

Lucy gives a beautifully clear explanation of what the resource is and which children it has been developed for.  This is for generalisation of the ‘s’ sound and for older children (5-10 year olds).  She also clearly explains who can use the resource and how, as well as a description of how we produce the ‘s’ sound.  This makes the resource accessible to not just SLT’s but also schools and parents.  There are some lovely pages here that you could hand out to schools alongside the games to explain how to help the child.

There are then 15 games.  The games are very clearly explained, again making them great to send to parents or schools.  There are some familiar ones such as Go Fish and Happy Families, but also some slightly different ones!  I had a child laughing rather hard at my poor drawing skills whilst trying to draw some ‘s’ words!

Some of the harder games make great language resources as well.  There is a game called Describe It If You Can which comes with a number of pictures and each picture has 5 words.  At the harder level you have to describe the picture without using the target words – this is really quite tough!

Another game Lucy uses which I love is Would You Rather. Here she has set a range of questions for discussion. For example, ‘Would you rather be a famous singer or Santa?’.  These can provoke some great discussion and really challenge the child to remember to use their ‘s’ sound as well.

I don’t know about you, but can you ever have enough pre-made resources for sound generalisation?  Especially when you can just print and send the games to schools or parents.  You can check out Lucy’s book at Stass here.