Recently I’ve had a few parents mention to me that their child is receiving speech support at school, but they haven’t been given any ideas of activities they can do at home to help their child.

First off, round of applause for those parents. Providing home support for what is happening at school is one huge way to help your child’s speech. Having short bursts of practice across the day at school and at home is definitely the way for your child to make maximum progress in speech and, well, most learning, really.

Secondly, my first suggestion would be to go directly to the person who is providing the speech support and let them know you are keen to support your child’s speech at home and would welcome some ideas or activities to help you with this. 

The recommendations that I tend to give to parents  of children I am working with are:

1.     Fit practice into your daily routine: if you are already routinely doing something, then the chances of you also doing speech practice at the same time are significantly higher (and easier) than trying to start a new routine and stick to it. E.g. could you do speech practice after school homework, as you’re already sitting down with your book open, ready to work. Could you fit some speech practice into the bedtime story? Could you practice the sound in front of the mirror at teeth-brushing time?

2.     Try to get a few practices in while reading with your child: if your child can’t make the target sound easily yet, you could point it out in words yourself and repeat the word a few times to give your child extra exposures to the sound, e.g. “Here’s the word sausage. The letter S is making the sss sound. I can see two letter S’s in sausage. Here they are, at the beginning of sausage and in the middle of sausage. I like to eat my sausages with tomato sauce. How do you like your sausages?" If your child can make the sound when they focus on it, you could ask them to read or say some of the words in the text or pictures that contain the target sound.

3.     There is good evidence to show that when children have lots of exposures to speech sounds, it can help them learn to make them. Recasting is one of the ways to give your child extra exposures to the sounds they are having difficulty with. Recasting means that when your child says a word incorrectly, you’re going to repeat that word and other similar-sounding words as many times as you can in one minute. You’re aiming for 12-18 repetitions. Sound like a lot? Watch my you-tube video to see a demonstration (start at 1:10) This technique was created by Caroline Bowen, a hugely respected Speech Language Pathologist, who specialises in Speech Sound Disorders.

4.     Another way to help your child to help themselves, is to get them to listen in and decide if their speech sounds are accurate or not. They need to be able to hear an error, before they can fix it up. You can do this in a gentle way by occasionally asking your child for self-evaluations of their speech, e.g. “Did you make a clear S sound in sun?”

5.     Once you know your child can make the sound successfully, you can occasionally ask them to “fix up” an error in their speech, e.g. “I heard you say thun, when I think you meant sun. Can you fix it up?”

6.     Praise is a great tool to use sparingly. You can give your child praise for trying, e.g. “I saw you really trying your best to get your tongue up behind your teeth, well done.” You can give it for success, e.g. “I heard such a clear S sound in sing, great work.” And if they use the target sound in everyday talking without you needing to prompt them, e.g. “I heard a clear S sound in supermarket just now, you’re getting so good at this.”

7.     Everyone learns best when they’re enjoying themselves, so why not practice speech while playing a game. I've made a downloadable handout with tonnes of ideas of games you can play with your child, while practicing their speech. These games are for when your child can say the target sound correctly in words. The games are designed to be played with speech-sound word cards, so ask the person working on speech with your child for a set to use at home, or look online for a set.

8.     Try and keep it light, fun and enjoyable, so that both you and your child WANT to do the practice. I’m sure you don’t want to nag, and I’m even more sure your child doesn’t want to BE nagged. Doing activities that you both enjoy, and being gentle in your responses, will help with you both wanting to keep working on speech together.

So there you have the home practice suggestions I recommend to the parents of children I am working with. I hope you find them useful for practicing with your child. 

If you'd like more 1:1 support from an experienced Speech Language Therapist (me!) to get your child speaking clearly, I recommend my Speech Support Membership, where there's fortnightly live trainings, in a bite-sized format, monthly group calls, where you can ask questions about your child, a one-hour video call with me that you can use at any time, access to one speech sound video course of your choice, plus all my handouts.