Teach Your Child Speech Sounds

Guidelines For Teaching Sounds

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TEACHING THE SOUND IN ISOLATION

Teaching your child how to make the sound is the most important step.  He needs to learn to produce it correctly in isolation before he can ever produce it correctly in conversation.  In this course, each sound will have it’s own module where you can learn how to teach that sound to your child.  This step can take a short time or a very long time, depending on various factors, like:

• the age of your child
• how motivated your child is
• how often you practice
• how difficult it is to physically produce that sound

For instance, a vocalic R sound requires a certain level of tongue control and the ability to understand more complex instructions.  A toddler might not have the ability to learn this sound as well as a kindergartner.  Be patient and keep trying.  Take a break when necessary.

Remember that specific feedback is really important – tell your child exactly what he is doing right or wrong.  Always keep the mood positive and fun and reward him at the end.  Don’t assume the child is understanding your directions – make him repeat it back to you and attempt to show you how to do it.  That way you’ll know he is understanding your instructions.

Make sure your child can produce the sound in isolation easily before you move up to the syllables level.

 PRACTICING IN SYLLABLES, WORDS, PHRASES, AND SENTENCES

The key to practicing the sound at these levels is simply lots of repetition.  Practice the sound over and over, using the practice documents provided, and be sure to give lots of specific feedback and praise for working hard.  You can use the practice documents included with each sound module, and have your child repeat each word or phrase or sentence 3 times.

When your child can produce the sound correctly at a certain level, then you can move up to the next level.  Typically, we figure that if a child can do it correctly 80% of the time, it’s time to move up and try the harder level.  So if your child can correctly produce ‘S’ in isolation 80% of the time, then he can move up to ‘S’ in syllables.  When he can produce ‘S’ in syllables correctly 80% of the time, he can move up to words.  He would then practice ‘Initial S’ in words, ‘Medial S’ in words,’ and then ‘Final S’ in words before moving on to ‘S’ in Phrases.  He would practice ‘Initial S’ in phrases, ‘Medial S’ in phrases, and ‘Final S’ in phrases before moving on to Sentences, and so on.  For example, here is an outline of how you might teach the ‘S’ sound:

SAMPLE OUTLINE FOR TEACHING ‘S’

• ‘S’ in isolation
• ‘S’ in syllables 

• Initial ‘S’ in words
• Medial ‘S’ in words
• Final ‘S’ in words 

• Initial ‘S’ in phrases
• Medial ‘S’ in phrases
• Final ‘S’ in phrases 

• Initial ‘S’ in sentences
• Medial ‘S’ in sentences
• Final ‘S’ in sentences 

• ‘S’ in reading
• ‘S’ in conversation 

You would follow this same type of outline for any sound you teach.  If at any point your child starts to do poorly at a certain level, back up to an easier level and practice some more until the child is more proficient. 

PRACTICING IN READING AND CONVERSATION

Reading and Conversation are the hardest levels.

If your child is old enough to read, the next step would be to have your child practice reading a book and pronouncing ‘S’ words in the story correctly.

This works best if your child is already a proficient reader.  If not, the time spent decoding the word in order to read it aloud can interfere with the process of pronouncing the ‘S’.  So if your child is not a proficient reader, you might want to skip straight to the conversation level.

To be proficient in conversation requires the child to have practiced the sound so much that it is automatic. Remember the analogy of driving a car. When you first learned, you had to remember to do all the little steps like putting in the key, adjusting the gears, moving your feet from brake to gas, turning on the blinker, looking left and right. After you’d been driving for a few years, those things became automatic. In the same way, we want your child to start producing her sounds correctly without having to think about it before she opens her mouth.

So how do you practice a sound in conversation?  Well, if your child is working on ‘S’, for example, you could have your child tell you everything she knows about a certain ‘S’ word, like ‘sun’.  Or just have her talk about a favorite game or vacation.

One thing I like to do to elicit as many target words as possible is to pick three or four pictures of ‘S’ words, and ask the child to make up a story using them.  Sometimes you have to do the first one, and make it kind of silly, and then the child will become enthused about trying to do one also.  You can use the practice materials in this course to get ‘S’ pictures for the story.

Let me give an example using a page from the ‘Initial R’ practice document for conversation.

I would bring up the page and tell a short story using the words like this:

Once upon a time, Ricky was riding his new bike.  He rode near a river.  There were lot of rocks by the river, and it was bumpy, so he fell off his bike and into the river!  When he got out of the river, he was all wet.  But he saw a railroad track, and followed it to the next town.  Then he got a ride back to his bike.

You ask your child to repeat the story to you, using all the names of the pictures the way you did.  Then move on to the next page, and let your child tell a story.  The more crazy the story is, the more you need to act entertained and amazed.  Then they will try harder and get more descriptive the next time around.

Short conversations like this will help you see if the child can really produce the sound correctly without thinking about it too much.

If they are focused on the story or conversation, they will not be putting all their attention on their sound.  This is a good indicator of how proficient they really are at making that sound.

If your child is not doing well at the conversation level, back up and go to sentences.  Wait until she is more proficient at those, and then try conversation again.

Eventually, your child will become fluent with the sound in conversation!

Head on over to the next lesson to learn how to help your child maintain the progress that they’ve made and continue to speak correctly.