Articulation therapy focuses on the sounds that your child makes when speaking. Some speech sound errors are part of normal development, and many children make developmental errors. If your child is participating in school-based articulation therapy, it could be due to some of the following reasons:

• They continue to make developmental errors past the typical age of that sound development.

• They make many, many sound errors.

• They make atypical errors that are not part of typical development.

• The child's sound errors make it difficult for them to be understood at school.

• The child's sound errors keep them from talking and socializing at school.

• The child's sound errors are impacting their ability to learn to read and write.

In articulation therapy, your child's speech therapist might be working on the following skills:

• helping your child discriminate between correct and incorrect speech sounds.

• teaching your child to correctly produce certain speech sounds.

• getting your child to practice the correct sounds at different levels of complexity: in isolation, in a syllable, in a word, and eventually in sentences, reading, and conversational speech.

Often times, articulation therapy is repetitive. Once your child can correctly produce a sound, we want them to practice that sound correctly over and over until they can make the sound correctly without thinking about it. Just like we have "motor memory" for tasks like tying shoes, we want our students to develop motor memory for correctly producing all speech sounds.

The Role of the Family

The family plays an important role in making progress in articulation therapy. Your child only gets to see their speech therapist a few times a week. It is important to find time to practice your child's speech sounds at home in order for your child to make progress. Below are some resources that you can use to help your child practice speech at home. Don't hesitate to contact your child's speech therapist if you need help picking appropriate activities or sounds to work on at home.