Teach Your Child Speech Sounds

How to Structure a Speech Session

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INFORMAL SPEECH SESSIONS

There are many ways to sneak in speech sessions at home. It doesn’t always have to be a formal sit-down practice session.  For instance, you might practice for a few minutes in the car on the way to the store, while taking a walk together, or while doing chores.  Just ask your child to repeat some practice words while you are doing those activities together.  Or deliberately pick activities or toys that involve using words with their speech sound.

Think about how babies and toddlers learn to talk.  We don’t have formal lessons with them, and yet they pick it up.  The more you talk to your kids, and speak around them, the more your child will learn.

And, I almost hate to bring this up, but avoid baby talk with children who are no longer babies!  Some parents think their child’s speech error is cute and hate to ‘let it go’.   My advice is, take a video to save the cuteness, then let it go!

As soon as your child can talk, you can begin to model correct pronunciation when he makes a mistake.  You don’t need to make a big deal out of it, just repeat what he said using correct pronunciation.  For instance, if your child says, “I want to go wif you”, you can respond, “Oh, you want to go WITH me?  Why do you want to go WITH me?”  The idea is to repeat the correct pronunciation of the word as much as possible, in a natural way.  This is one of the easiest things you can do to improve your child’s speech.  Reading to them is another great thing!  They’ll become familiar with the way words are supposed to be pronounced by hearing you speak them over and over.

DEDICATED PRACTICE SESSIONS

Now let’s talk about how to plan your formal practice sessions.  Actually, I don’t like the word ‘formal’, let’s call them ‘dedicated’, meaning that you are focused solely on speech during that time period.

If your child only has one speech sound error, then your session will be pretty simple.  Say you have a kindergartner who is struggling with ‘TH’.  She says ‘free’ for ‘three’, and ‘wif’ for ‘with’.  You’d like to help her say this sound correctly, even though you know this is a later-developing sound.  You might do a 10 minute session each day or even just a few times a week.

The outline of your session might look something like this:

PRACTICE SESSION FOR 1 SOUND

2- minutes – prepare

• encourage your child to practice speech
• get materials ready

6 minutes – ‘TH’ in isolation

• model the correct ‘TH’ production in isolation
• ask your child to produce ‘TH in isolation
• have your child tell you how to produce ‘TH’ in isolation (to make sure she knows how well enough to describe it)
• If she can do ‘TH’ in isolation well, have your child begin practicing ‘Initial TH’ in words, using the practice materials, repeating each word 3 times
• encourage your child for putting her tongue between her teeth, paying attention, trying hard, or anything else she’s doing right.  (Be specific!)
• Kindly correct any errors like putting teeth on her lip as an ‘F’ sound, etc. (Be specific!)
• Wrap up the ‘TH’ practice by encouraging progress made

2 minutes – wrap it up

• Praise your child for working hard
• Give a small reward
• Put away materials and tell your child when you’ll be practicing again

PRACTICE SESSION FOR MULTIPLE SOUNDS

What if your child has more than one sound with errors?  What would your speech session using multiple sounds look like?  You could work on a different sound each day or you could work on multiple sounds each session.

Say you have a second grader who struggles with ‘TH, vocalic R, and S’.   He has a lisp for ‘S’ and knows how to produce it correctly but needs practice.  He can’t produce vocalic ‘R’ at all.  He can say ‘TH’ correctly but often forgets in conversation.

In a 30-minute session, you might spend 10 minutes working on ‘S’ in words, 5 minutes working on vocalic R in isolation, and then 10 minutes on ‘TH’ in conversation.  Since vocalic ‘R’ is harder, you would sandwich that between the 2 easier sounds, so that your child doesn’t get discouraged.

So the outline for your session might look something like this:

2-3 minutes – prepare

• encourage your child to practice speech
• get materials ready

10 minutes – ‘Initial S’ in words

• model the correct ‘S’ production in isolation
• ask your child to produce ‘S’ in isolation
• have your child tell you how to produce ‘S’ in isolation (to make sure he knows how well enough to describe it)
• have your child begin practicing ‘Initial S’ in words, using the practice materials, repeating each word 3 times
• encourage your child for putting tongue behind upper teeth, keeping teeth mostly closed, paying attention, trying hard, or anything else he’s doing right. (Be specific!)
• Kindly correct any errors like sticking tongue between teeth, opening mouth to far, etc. (Be specific!)
• Wrap up the ‘S’ practice by encouraging progress made

5 minutes – Vocalic R in isolation

• Model correct ‘ER’ production
• Show using a mouth puppet or flashlight in your mouth
• Have your child practice tongue placement
• Do a fun ‘R practice warmup’
• Encourage what he does right (be specific)
• Kindly correct what he doesn’t do right (be specific)
• Wrap up the ‘ER’ practice by encourage progress made

10 minutes – TH in conversation

• Model correct ‘TH’ in isolation
• Have your child model correct ‘TH’ in isolation
• Have your child tell you a story using the ‘TH’ in conversation practice materials. Have your child tell you about something that happened that week.  Have your child discuss his favorite game.
• Encourage what he does right (be specific)
• Kindly correct what he doesn’t do right (be specific)

2-3 minutes – wrap it up

• Praise your child for working hard
• Give a small reward
• Put away materials and tell your child when you’ll be practicing again

Now it doesn’t have to look exactly like this, but you get the idea.  Shorter sessions tend to be easier with young children, so if you have a preschooler working on those same sounds, you might do 5 minutes on ‘TH’ in the morning, 5 minutes on ‘R’ after lunch, and 5 minutes on ‘S’ in the evening.

In the next lesson we’ll learn some more guidelines for teaching sounds.