When your child has a language disorder, and you want to get a good speech therapy program, your child’s speech-language pathologist (SLP) is going to be the main facilitator behind your child’s progress. Still, your children can greatly benefit from performing speech therapy activities on their own. By speeding up his development, you’ll be able to see him overcome his language disorder much earlier. Your children could make dramatic improvements in their speech development as early as four years old.
Speech Therapy Activities
If you decide that you want to involve your children in speech therapy, you can do a few things. First, encourage them to talk and listen, even if they can’t say it. When your child says something to you, say it back and let him hear how good it sounds.
If your children don’t have their therapists, try to find one who will give your children private lessons for free or at a reduced rate. This allows your children to practice speaking in front of others. It will enable children to develop the confidence they need to talk in front of an audience. However, don’t forget that their speech therapy activity isn’t the only way to help your children learn to speak. You may want to take your children along on regular speech therapy sessions so they can hear how someone else talks to them. This can give them the encouragement they need to start learning.
Encourage Your Children During Speech Activities
Don’t get discouraged by your children, not saying much during the speech therapy activity. This is often a sign that their throat muscles aren’t used to being forced to produce sound. You may also notice them speaking slower than usual during this time, but this is perfectly normal.
Speech therapy activities help to speed up your children’s progress toward fluency. At first, your children may speak as if they were at an elementary school level, but their speech will gradually increase in pitch and speed over time. They’ll also be talking with more accuracy. After several weeks of speech therapy exercises, you should be able to have your child speak clearly and confidently in front of you without any problems. They may be able to do so much faster than before.
If your children have a hard time speaking at first, try talking to your doctor about getting them involved in some speech therapy activities. In many cases, doctors can set up programs that involve a few hours of therapy sessions. Just make sure you keep in mind that the speech therapy activity is only one component of a much larger learning program.
