Children can have speech sound problems for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes these can be resolved fairly quickly, but for others, they need speech therapy over a very long period of time. One cause of severe speech sound problems is verbal dyspraxia (known in most other countries as Childhood Apraxia of Speech). It’s a diagnosis […]
When teaching a 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 this is […]
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 […]
Helen and I love finding new iPad apps. When I first bought my iPad, the children (and I) were so excited we would spend whole sessions using it! However, I now see it as another tool in my ‘speech bag’. It is often offered as a reward – well the child sees it as a […]
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 […]
On looking back over our first year of blogging, we’ve been looking over our 58 posts. It’s interesting to see which posts we enjoyed writing the most, and which ones have had the most views (not necessarily the same ones). We thought, since we share this blog, that it would be interesting for us to […]
Rebecca Bright from Therapy box very kindly contacted Helen and I and offered us two of their apps to review on our blog. This is a review of the minimal pairs app, and Helen will be reviewing the sort it out app in the next few weeks. Although Rebecca very kingly gave me a free […]
I love finding new apps that I can use with the kids I see. Like technology or hate it, there are few things that motivate as well as a really good app! I can’t take the credit for finding this one though – I did a joint session with another SLT recently and she had […]
Many children have difficulty saying certain sounds clearly. Sometimes, it is a normal developmental stage and will improve on its own; at other times they may require some direct help from a Speech Therapist. Parents often ask what they can do at home to help. Eating Talking and eating use many of the same muscles, […]
One of the questions I often get asked is “my child can say a particular sound in sentences when I remind him, but he still doesn’t use it while he’s talking. Why?” There can be several reasons for this. First of all, he might not really hear or recognise his own errors when he’s talking, […]
