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 […]
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 […]
Object function – that is a real speech therapy term! What I mean is linking a verb to an object e.g. what do we cut with? – scissors, what do we sleep on? – a bed. So we are linking a function or verb to an item. This is an important step in language development […]
Before Christmas, Helen wrote a post about teaching children to use the regular past tense. Once the child has mastered this, the next fun step is all the irregular verbs! As with nearly all grammatical rules in English there are always exceptions. We didn’t ‘blowed’ out the candles on the birthday cake yesterday we didn’t ‘sleeped’ and […]
I know personally that food shopping is something I dread. It’s busy and I hate the way supermarkets move things around so you can’t find them! I also know that for many parents the idea of taking children with you is even worse! But, sometimes if you can involve your children in the activity you […]
Many children find the temporal concepts of before and after hard. They are tricky as they change depending on where in the sentence they are, making the rules harder to learn. You will also often find it set as a target. So how can you teach a child before and after? As before and after are […]
Today, we’re delighted to be featuring a guest blog post from Lucy Sanctuary. We reviewed some of her fab books a while ago (you can read that review here). Lucy has also recently started her own blog which is brilliant – do follow this link and check it out. This post first appeared there, but […]
Helen recently wrote about working on inferencing skills. You can read her post here. Today I am going to write about prediction skills. You are likely to see inferencing and prediction skills spoken about together and there are similarities between them. It is also highly likely that if you find one hard, you will also […]
Well, in typical British bank holiday form, it is indeed raining cats and dogs today! But I thought I would grab the bull by the horns, put pen to paper and write this post. These are just some of the fantastic idioms we have in the English language and that can cause real confusion for children […]
This is the third post in our series on narrative therapy. If you haven’t read the others you might want to go and have a quick look first! Read the introduction here and ideas for teaching who here. Helen did mention that the order you work through the questions may alter between younger and older […]
