Teach Your Child Speech Sounds

Maintaining Progress

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Once your child can produce the sound successfully in conversation, the next thing to do is just make sure the correct productions continue!  Keep encouraging your child to make the sounds correctly, and return to practicing sentences if necessary.

What does this look like on a daily basis?

If you hear your child slip up and mispronounce a word, get her attention and give him the chance to correct it on his own.

For instance, if she says, “I see a wabbit,” look at her quizzically and say, “What?  You see what?”

The idea is to get her to pause, recognize her error, and correct it on her own.  This is important for her to ‘rewire’ her brain/speech patterns and make correct production a natural part of life.  If she doesn’t recognize the error from your hint, you might have to get specific. “Did you mean to say, ‘rabbit?’“  Emphasize the correct pronunciation. You might have your child do some more practice drills with the sound in sentences. (I see a rabbit, I see a rabbit, I see a rabbit.)

Important note:  try not to embarrass your child in public, because that will just backfire and could even discourage her from speaking freely.  We never want to dampen our child’s desire to communicate.

When you are in public, you might have a secret signal to remind your child to watch her speech.  For instance, pulling on your ear could be a gesture that means, “Did you forget your ‘TH’ sound?”  You could encourage his teacher or other caregivers to do this as well.  This is one way to help remind her say her sound correctly in public.

Continue to read books with the sound, point out items that begin with that sound, etc.  Soon your child will be speaking correctly and naturally without thinking twice about it!

Now it’s time to pick a sound and get started.  You’ve got this!