Speech Therapy Activities
Speech Therapy activities work! It is simply a matter of knowing what you want to achieve and then finding activities to do it. There is overwhelming research to show how effective many speech therapy activities are. It is also well known that children learn best when they are enjoying what they are doing.
When working with children on Speech Therapy Activities, take into account these basic principles and you and your child will enjoy the process:
Make it fun. Brains are more receptive to learning when people are happy.
Drills work. Doing things over and over helps the brain to learn. The trick is to make it interesting so that children are prepared to do a task many times.
Do it different ways. If you can think of a variety of ways to practise a concept this helps the brain to really grasp whatever it is that you are trying to teach.
Practise until automatic. If something is practised for a while, it does not necessarily mean that it will be remembered. Practise has to continue until the task can be done easily and automatically – then it will never be forgotten.
Goals must be achievable. Set realistic goals so that children understand that they CAN do what you are asking.
Help when needed. Learn how to make tasks a little easier or a little harder without changing the task. This is what professionals often call “Step up” and “Step down”.
Be consistent. Know what you are trying to achieve and stick to it. Make it very clear to your child what you want them to do.
Speech Therapy Activities for Parents
Speech Therapy Activities for Parents
You want your child to grow up to be the best communicator they can be. By finding out about language development and following tips from a Speech Pathologist, you can make the most of your child’s abilities.
Good communication is a key to child development. Speech is vital for learning – thinking skills are based on a child’s ability to communicate.
We will show you how to give your child the very best start you can, so they do well at school, in life skills and in socialising with others.
You can start from the time your baby is tiny. As your baby grows, be aware of what is expected of children at different ages. You can talk, sing, play and be preparing them for the next steps in communicating.
Do make talking and communicating lots of fun!
When Speech Pathologists work with children to improve their communication skills, they look at many different aspects. Some of the areas they work with are talking (expressive language or articulation), listening and remembering, fluency for stuttering, understanding (comprehension, or receptive language), grammar, telling stories (oral narrative) and social skills.
By being aware that there is more to talking than just talking, you can help your child grow in all the areas that are essential.
This site has simple speech therapy activities for you to use with your babies and children so that you can make their speech and language development the best possible.
If you think that your child is not reaching speech and language milestones, seek help from a Speech Pathologist. Most professional associations have websites where you can find details of local Speech Pathologists.
Speech Therapy Activities for Teachers
Every class you take will include a number of children who have difficulties with talking, listening or understanding (or a combination of all of these). And these are often the same children that struggle to achieve literacy.
In fact, research has indicated that up to 16% of Australian children have reading difficulties (Westwood, 2001). This means 4-5 children in every class, and in some areas this can be higher.
It has been well documented that failure to achieve at school results in academic and emotional problems, as well as behavioural issues in the classroom.
Children who don’t listen are a problem in the classroom. These are the children who are not able to follow a series of instructions accurately. They can cause disruption, or they may ‘tune out’ or be looking around to see what everyone else is doing. They are at serious risk of failing to reach targets. The good news it that there are speech therapy activities that you can use to help those kids and improve behaviour and learning in your classroom.
Reading and writing are complex tasks, and are based on language skills, including awareness of sounds (phonological awareness), and of the structure of words and sentences (syntactic awareness). Children also need a good vocabulary and the ability to process information quickly.
The first few years at school are a time for significant expansion of talking skills, particularly vocabulary, oral narrative, complex sentence structure and verbal problem solving. Teachers are ideally placed to help their students develop language skills appropriate to their age.
This site will include activities for you to use that include:
Focussed listening
Phonogical awareness
Word awareness
Syntactic awareness
Letter – to- sound correspondence
Speech Therapy Activities for Speech Pathologists
Speech Pathologists are always on the lookout for new speech threapy activity ideas to make sessions maximally effective. Small children, in particular, often need more than one activity to practise a particular skill. And these activities need to be motivating and achieve what they set out to do.
Speech Pathologists also need activities that can be given to parents to make home practising productive, and strategies for teachers to work with children with communication deficits.
Children are all different. We see variations and permutations of disorders and levels of skill, and people learn at different rates. of learning. Sometimes we see the weird and the wonderful!
“We use dynamic assessment constantly to work out where a client is up to, and to identify their strengths and weaknesses. We work out where we want them to be in their skill acquisition and the achievable steps to get there. We give them the confidence to develop and enthuse them with reality-based optimism.” (Martin Seligman, 1997) .
A great deal of what we do is to demonstrate to parents and teachers how to apply the therapy processes in day-to-day life and it is very important to give the parents some speech therapy activities they can practice with their chidren at home. You find out what children can do with help and show parents how to help them achieve this next step.
You will find material you can use to do this in the three different sections of this site.