Do you have a Twinkl subscription?  We both do – we’ve had them for years.  In fact, I’ve had my subscription so long, that I sometimes forget to check what’s new in there.  There is so much stuff – whenever I’m stuck for a resource to work on a particular target, Twinkl is one of the places I go to.  Here are some of the reasons why I love Twinkl They are resources in British English which is a bonus as a lot of the other apps and resources I use are American. There’s so much stuff in there that you are bound to find something for whatever target you need. They have load ..read more

Speech and language therapy does tend to involve practising something that you find difficult over and over again. No-one enjoys doing that! It is particularly difficult if you realise that it is something other people seem to manage effortlessly, but you really struggle with it. It’s so important that we support children’s self-esteem while they are going through the process. It’s our responsibility to make sessions as fun as possible to motivate the children to participate and to put in strategies where we can to reduce the frustration that they can feel day to day. Here are some tips to d ..read more

Fronted adverbials. Conjunctions. Determiners.  These are just some of the fantastic pieces of technical vocabulary that all children in the UK need to know for their year 6 SATS.  Now unless you have taken a linguistics degree, the chances are you don’t know what these words mean, which can make helping with homework very hard. Children with language difficulties within mainstream schools are also expected to learn these words, be able to give examples and find them in written sentences.  I find I spend quite a bit of time in years 5 and 6 working on them.  We may not get all the way to det ..read more

Today, I’m going right back to the earliest building blocks of language – babble.  Parents are often (understandably) concerned about when their child said their first word.  However, there are other stages of development that come before that. What is babble? Babies make sound from the moment they are born.  Obviously, they cry!  They all laugh, burp and make cooing-type sounds.  These sounds are all great and important but they are not usually made purposefully.  Babies then move on to making strings of consonant and vowel sounds (eg “bababa” or “dadadada”).  This is called babble and it’s ..read more

Today, we are very privileged to have a guest post from a parent.  Sarah Moriarty has a child with a severe speech disorder who attends a specialist centre.  She has agreed to write about her experiences for us.  I’m just going to hand straight over to her as I think her words say it all. “I waited 4 years for my son to call me ‘mummy’. I cannot begin to describe how much my heart jumps every time he says my name. My little boy attends a specialist pre-school for children with moderate to severe speech and language disorders. During his first term, I remember mentioning to his wonderful spee ..read more

Helen and I were thrilled when Sue O’Malley, Specialist Speech and Language Therapist offered to write a post about Semantic feature analysis.  It isn’t something I have used ….yet, but it looks really useful and I will be trying this soon!  You can find out more about Sue on her website www.chattertutor.co.uk.  Here is her post:- Semantic Features Analysis for Vocabulary Development and Word Finding Difficulties I wanted to share a technique I have been using with some of my children recently. I found it on the website Reading Rockets. A grid is used to help children explore how things are ..read more

I am very aware that I need to keep therapy fun.  We are constantly asking the child to do the thing they find hardest – again and again.  So to help keep a child engaged in therapy, many therapists use toys and games.  However there are only so many times I can play Buckaroo in a day without getting very bored!  So every now and then I like to buy new things!  I thought everyone might be interested in my latest selection – so here it is!  You can find all of these on Amazon and other retailers as well. Laminating pockets :Now, I know this isn’t a toy and is fairly boring, but I get through ..read more

This post is in response to a question that someone asked.  We had an email from someone on our mailing list who asked how they could encourage their child to imitate speech sounds.  Here are some ideas. Start by copying them.  Copy what your child does and the sounds that they make.  This is something we often naturally do with babies – we copy back their babbled sounds.  However, as kids get older we often stop doing it.  Start by copying what they are doing with toys and move on to copying the sounds they make. Practise general copying.  Play other games where you copy each other.  Pull ..read more

I often see children for assessment who are using a few words, but have a limited range of language.  Often these children tend to just say one word when they speak, rather than linking 2 or more words together.  So today I’m going to talk about when children start to move on from single words and how to help them do that. When do children start linking words? When children have around 50 single words which they are using fairly consistently, they usually begin to link them together to make their own unique phrases. They may use these to indicate that they want something repeated (eg “more c ..read more

It may still be November, but some of the schools I visit are already starting to practise their Christmas plays.  So I thought I would write about how to make plays and assemblies more accessible for children with speech and language difficulties.  Every child should be included; you might juts have to think laterally about a few things! Don’t assume It can be easy to think that plays will just be too stressful for the child or that they can’t take part.  However, with the right practise and support most children can take part in some shape or form.  However, if it is really too stressful ..read more