Top 10 posts of 2017

A rather belated happy new year to you all!  I can’t believe it January 8th already!

At this time of year, people tend to look back over the last year and forward to the next one.  Here at Speech Blog UK headquarters (ie Elizabeth’s lounge!) we tend to do the same.  It’s always interesting to see which posts have been read the most over the last year as it helps us to decide what to write about and do next.  It’s also great to see other things we may have achieved over the past year.  This year’s big achievement for us was releasing our two online courses, which we are really proud of.  If you have or work with a child whose speech is unclear do check them out here.

And now, without further ado, here are our top 10 posts of 2017 – a mixture of old posts and new ones.

1. Games to improve auditory memory  and Strategies to support auditory memory.  This is a topic that I often get asked about, so it’s no surprise to me to see it top of the list.  Make sure you read both posts together as the games don’t tend to be effective unless you use the strategies as well.

2. Before/after.  These are tricky words that lots of kids struggle with and they are hard to teach.  This post gives some ideas to start you off.

3.  FREEBIES.  Just in case you are not one of the people who have visited this page, go and check it out.  We have a range of free handouts on this page, as well as a free online course.  If you join our email list, you get a free e-book too.

4.  How to have conversations with children with unclear speech.  This is a new post from 2017.  Our posts about unclear speech always get positive feedback and this is a great one to share with friends, family, teachers and anyone else who comes into contact with your child.

5.  Narrative therapy.  This is the first of a series of posts about narrative therapy.  Click through the links to read the other posts in the series.

6.  Taking the mystery out of assessments: CELF-4.  When your child has an assessment by a speech and language therapist, educational psychologist, occupational therapist or other professional sometimes the report and the test results can be hard to understand.  We wrote this post to help people to understand one of the tests we use most frequently – CELF-4.

7.  How to use Lego to support speech and language.  Lego is a huge favourite in this house and it is a fabulous fun tool to use to teach so many skills.  In this post, we give some ideas on how to build speech and language skills with Lego.

8.  101 games to play to practise speech sounds.  Practising speech sounds can become boring quite quickly as it is very repetitive.  Here are lots of ideas of how to keep it fun.

9.  Understanding key words.  If you have a young child who struggles with understanding language, they may well be working on understanding of key words.  As well as this post, we have also written some more detailed posts on different levels this year – click the links to read about 1 key word, 2 key words and 3 key words.

10.  Help! My toddler isn’t talking.  In day to day life people approach me from time to time to ask about their child because they know what I do.  Apart from questions about children struggling with particular speech sounds, this is the question I most commonly get asked.  We wrote a series of posts to try to help.  Click through the posts to read the rest of the series.

Do visit the blog next week, to find out something new that we are doing for 2018.  See you then!