Speech Pathologist

Welcome back! I look forward to seeing new and familiar friendly faces in therapy this year. A letter will be sent home to parents shortly about when children will participate in therapy, how often and how many sessions they have qualified for. If parents have concerns with their child’s speech or language, please talk to their teachers about a referral.

I thought I would take this opportunity to provide families with a few more activities for the home to help develop language and literacy skills:

Talking activities

• Play word games that encourage your child to learn sounds. E.g. I spy with my little eye something beginning with k-k-k. What do you think I’m looking at that starts with that sound?’
• Ask your child about words that rhyme. E.g., ‘Which other words sound like ‘far?’.
• Talk about the past. Ask your child to tell you something they enjoyed doing at school that week. Talk about the future. Tell your child what you’re going to do on the next day or on the weekend, or ask them to tell you what they need to do before they go to bed.

Reading and writing activities

• Read stories and then talk about them. Ask, ‘What was that story about?’ or ‘Did you like that character? Why?’
• Take turns reading. You could read half the page while your child reads the other half. You could also point out single words here and there for your child to sound out. Start with words that are easy to sound out – for example, two-letter and three-letter words like ‘cat’, ‘no’ or ‘lip’.
• Ask your child to make a storybook with their own pictures. They can do this on a computer or with pens and paper. Help them write the words or at least some of the letters in the story.
• Select a few alphabet letters and move them around to make new sounds – bat, tab etc. Practise sounding them out letter by letter, then saying the word – for example, ‘b-a-t makes the word bat’. Start with lower-case letters, so you don’t confuse your child with the two different letter shapes for each sound.