Common speech disorders include articulation. Following are some easy tips for home that you can incorpate to enhance speech sounds:
Articulation
- Be sure to label items within the environment. This will facilitate expansion of vocabulary.
- Comment on every day activities or talk about what you are doing
- Engage child in finger plays, rhymes, songs
- Have child imitate facial expressions and movements with tongue and lips in a mirror. This increases awareness of the mouth and how to make different sounds.
- During play with your child, model and encourage use of environmental and animal sounds
- Read to your child, encourage labeling of pictures and identifying pictures when named
- Encourage use of gestures, pointing, and sign language to facilitate child's attempts at communication
LANGUAGE
There are also a variety of language disorders. Whatever the difficulty may be, there are several activities you can utilize in your daily routine to assist in improving your child's receptive and/or expressive langauge skills:
- Comment on daily activities - it is important to remember that children must first understand language before they will utilize language
- Label objects throughout their environment to improve vocabulary skills
- Acknowledge all attempts to communicate; repeat what you understand
- Reading to your child and having child 'read' a familiar story to you, as well as having child identify/point to pictures objects in books to inrease vocabulary skills
- Allow child to fill-in the blank to familiar songs, nursery rhymes, and finger plays
- Provide choices to your child; whether it be which food for snack or which color shirt to wear
- Engage in play with your child; talk about what the child is doing and ask questions during play
- Encourage your child to follow directions during play and within their daily routine
- Engage in imaginative play activities
- Engage in turn-taking games
- Use family photographs to talk about past events and build sentence structure
- Pause after speaking to your child to allow them to continue to the conversation