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Speech Therapy Exercises How To Make Treatment Work For You Auditory Processing Activities The Key To Developing Good Listening Skills Speech Therapy Games The Best Way To Make Speech Therapy Fun Speech And Language Activities The Simplest Way to Help Your Childs Development
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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 childs abilities. Good communication is a key to child development. Speech is vital for learning thinking skills are based on a childs 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 dont 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.

Speech Therapy Exercises How To Make Treatment Work For You

Written by admin on February 6, 2011 0 Comments

If you have been seeing a Speech Pathologist for treatment for yourself or for your child, they will have helped you to set goals and given you ways to achieve those goals. Often this involves doing exercises of some kind. The exercises you are given depend entirely on what you are trying to achieve. However, whatever you are asked to do, there are basic principles to follow to ensure that your treatment is successful. Basic principles to remember: 1. Follow the instructions. Listen to what your Speech Pathologist says. Ask for the instructions to be written down and follow them exactly. 2. Practise every day, wherever possible. Practise becomes habit, which avoids hassles over practise time. Your childs skill level is built up as quickly as possible. If you leave it a few days the brain is likely to have to relearn what it has forgotten. 3. Be generous with praise. Pour it on! Be specific, telling your child exactly

what they have done well, rather than just good boy or good girl. You can never use too much praise, especially for effort. 4. Make it fun. Obviously your child will be more compliant with practising if they are having fun. But did you know that brains learn better when they are happy? Children often dont realise they are working hard if you smile as you go! You can also use games and rewards. Use a variety to keep the enjoyment level up. 5. Use incentives. Everyone responds to incentives. Small children especially need immediate rewards for effort to ensure that they want to keep practising, and older children appreciate being rewarded for effort. Incentives can be small and immediate, such as mini-M&Ms for each try, or tokens that can be exchanged for a larger, delayed reward such as a movie. Change the incentives often, as they all lose their gloss after a while. You may be able to negotiate with older children. Rewards need to be meaningful. They must also only be given when deserved, but do reward effort as well as achievement. 6. Show your child that you are achieving your goals. People become disheartened when a task seems never ending. As often as possible, show your child what they can do now that they couldnt do before. It also helps you to see that you are achieving goals. You are putting a lot of time and money and effort into achieving them! At times it can help to use visual charts to show your child how far they have come. 7. Learn how to make the task easier WITHOUT changing the task. Sometimes a job might be too hard. Always remember exactly what it is you are trying to achieve. Ask your Speech Pathologist how you can make it a bit easier without changing what you are trying to achieve. 8. Just do what you can do in a day. Speech Pathologists appreciate that everything doesnt always go as planned in family life. There will be days when it is not possible to do anything but get through. As long as you are committed to

practising whenever possible, an occasional lapse is understood. The same principle applies if your Speech Pathologist is sending you home with more work than you can manage. Let them know that it is too much. Of course, it will take longer to achieve your goals, but if treatment is to be sustainable you need to be aware of how much you can reasonably cope with. I use a saying in my clinic, originally from Dr Suzuki, the wonderful mind behind the Suzuki music philosophy You dont have to practise on the days you dont want to eat!. Some children take a few minutes to realise the implications

Speech Therapy Games The Best Way To Make Speech Therapy Fun
Written by admin on January 30, 2011 0 Comments

Fun Speech Therapy Games Kids love playing games. Games are a great way for parents and children to share time. And children will do almost anything asked of them if they have fun doing it.

You dont need to spend a lot of money on special speech therapy games to do Speech Therapy with your child. Toy shops and books shops have wonderful learning toys if you are aiming to practise specific areas of language development. But you probably have games in your cupboard already that you can use. Here are some ideas to guide you if you are looking for games to buy, and ideas for using games that you already own. Games can be used to make a fun time out of drill. Drill is when a skill needs to be practised over and over again. Choose speech therapy games where you can take lots of turns quickly and allow a turn for every time your child does what is needed. Games that my children, or children I work with, have enjoyed include Dont wake Daddy, Ludo and removing bricks in Penguin. Or you can allocate points or tokens for each attempt and when, say, ten have been accumulated they can earn a turn at Hungry Hippos or colour a square in a colour by number picture. For younger children, games that can be used to encourage speech are valuable, such as Ducks on the Pond ?where they need to say Stop! or Go! or Barnyard Bingo where your child can be encouraged to say Put it in and Got it! as the token is removed at the bottom. These games have the added benefit of encouraging sorting into categories the ducks into shapes and colours (marked on the bottom of the ducks) and Barnyard Bingo into different animals. Many games can be used as incentives to keep children practising a particular skill. You can use games as simple as Snakes and Ladders and superimpose, for example, words or sounds on each square. Fishing games, where the players have little fishing rods to catch fish, usually with magnets, can be used to practise anything. You can even attach particular sounds or words to each fish using metal paperclips.

Listening games can be played from time a child is small. Accurate listening and remembering is a vital skill for children to develop if they are to do well at school. A listening game can be as simple as identifying sounds with their eyes shut. As they get older they can play remembering games such as I was going on a holiday and I packed where each player has to repeat the items that have already been said and add another. A similar game can be played with plastic shopping toys, cash registers, shopping baskets and pretend food. In turn, you place three or more items in your basket, naming them as you go. When you hide the basket your child has to name the items. As the game becomes easy, add more items and extra describing words about each item to be remembered exactly. Categorising games can be purchased often for a low cost. Games are useful that help children to put things together that belong together, these are some of the most effective speech therapy games. It is very important for the brain to store words methodically. There are some great commercially produced word association games that require children to explain why things go together, such as What Goes With That, Penguins to Peanuts. It is also important for children to be able to quickly name things that belong to the same category, such as Panic. However, it is not necessary to purchase games to practise this crucial skill. You can, for example, say to your child. Tell me five things for each category. Then name a category (eg jungle animals, sports, countries depending on the age and ability of your child.) As your child gets better at the game you can ask for more examples or encourage them to produce the examples faster use a stopwatch and aim to beat previous results. Card games are wonderful for language and cognitive (thinking) development. Any card game can also be used for learning rules and following sequences. You can simply also ask your child to deal the cards into piles and talk at the

same time the start of being able to multitask. My favourite card game is Blink. It is a fast game, encouraging faster thinking processing. Blink requires children to think across three concepts at a time colour, shape and number. Other games to look for involve sequencing putting pictures in order to tell stories, such as Tell-A-Story. It is very important for children to learn to tell a story in logical order. As children get older, word games are an enjoyable way to become familiar with letters and text, and help with vocabulary, spelling and reading, as well as the important area of word awareness. The more people understand about words the better they are at working with words.

A speech therapy game I use constantly to practise sight words is Memory. I simply make double copies of each word (on paper that cant be seen through!) and cut into squares. Children become so engrossed in playing the game that they dont remember they are practising words at all. You can manipulate the game by turning up the words that need the most practise without the correct pair. I also play dominoes to practise sounds that have different spellings. Make dominoes out of paper or card (they can be laminated) and write sounds with different spellings at each end of your dominoes (eg i-e, ie, igh and ay, a-e and ai). Instead of matching up numbers of dots, children match up the different sounds.

Barrier Games is a term often used by Speech Pathologists. It simply means a game where two people have matching parts to a game with a barrier between. They are often used to help children practise remembering and following instructions. Commercial Barrier Games can be purchased but you can simply have two large pieces of paper with a barrier between so that your child cannot see the other side. You give instructions for drawing, such as what to draw and where to put it, what colour to use. When the barrier is removed both drawings should be exact. This can also be done by photocopying two copies of an identical picture. Look in your cupboard and in your childs toy box and see how many ways you can use what you already own to make Speech Therapy practise thoroughly enjoyable!