Below you will find resources to help support your child's speech and language abilities. Parent involvement is always of paramount importance to a student's success. Though these supports are not a substitute for specialized speech and language services, they are ideal for practice and to facilitate carryover and in the case of a lapse in typical services due to school closure.
As children develop, they learn language from observing and interacting with others and their environment. Beginning in early childhood, we learn words and their meanings, grammar rules, sentence structure, conversation skills, and so much more. Most children develop these oral language skills implicitly from natural exposure, however some of our brain's have more difficulty learning these skills. Children and adults with language disorders need to be explicitly taught many of the skills using specialized methods. Since our ability to understand and use language are intertwined, most people impacted by language disorders experience both receptive language (input) and expressive language (output) difficulties. Difficulty sharing sharing thoughts, ideas, and feelings can be frustrating in school, home and social settings. Since spoken language serves as the foundation for written language, students with language disorders often struggle with literacy skills including reading, writing and spelling. Click here for resources to help your child with language skills.
A child with a speech sound disorder has difficulty producing speech sounds beyond the age that is typically expected. For example, /m, p, and b/ are expected to emerge early in speech development, /l, r/ and "th" often develop much later. Children with articulation or phonological disorders don't pick up on how to produce one or more age-expected speech sounds without explicit instructions. These ideas will help your child continue to improve his or her articulation at home. Click here for resources to support speech sound development.
Phonological and phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize and work with sounds in spoken language. From the beginning of development, our sound awareness begins with our ability to break apart stings of connected speech into words and phrases. When a baby first learns to talk, they focus on the meanings of words (i.e. "Mama" is that person that looks after me) and only by age 3-5 do they begin to realize that words are made up of smaller units, syllables and sounds ("Mama" starts with the sound /m/ and continues with /a/ /m/ /a/ . Phonological awareness tasks follow a continuum and include: rhyming, breaking words apart into their syllables, blending individual sounds into words, and manipulating sounds in words. Phonological awareness is the foundation for understanding and using language, using correct speech sounds, and learning to read. In order to become strong readers, children need to develop the ability to complete phonemic awareness tasks with proficiency. Click here for resources to support phonological awareness development.
Social communication refers to the skills we use when interacting with others. To be good communicators, we need to: understand and use nonverbal cues (e.g. eye contact, appropriate personal space, etc.), understand others' emotions as well as our own, think about others' perspectives, use good conversation skills, and know how to resolve social problems. These are just a few of the many skills that it takes to interact appropriately with others. These skills are often impaired in individuals with autism, ADHD, or developmental disabilities. Click here for resources to help with social communication development.
Stuttering is also referred to as speech fluency. Stuttering is a communication disorder in which the flow of speech is interrupted by repetitions (li-li-like this), prolongations (lllllike this), or abnormal stoppages (no sound) of sounds and syllables. There may also be facial and body movements associated with the effort to speak. Many young children go through a period of normal disfluency, but if it persists for more than a year, the child may need the services of a speech-language pathologist. Goals will be different depending on the unique needs of each child as well as their age. Students may work on: building awareness of their stuttering, learning about the speech mechanism and normal speech fluency, learning fluency techniques, building self-advocacy skills, or improving attitudes and emotions around stuttering. For resources related to stuttering, click here.
Decodable text is used in beginning reading instruction. They are carefully written to only include words that are consistent with the letter–sound relationships that have been taught to the new reader. As the student learns new letter-sound rules and patterns they are incorporated into the texts.
DLDandMe.org - All about Communication Disorders