Hello Again Family Chatterbox Blog Readers!
I am writing the fourth post in this blog series “The Path to Good Sounds” in our office after taking time to explain this whole hierarchy to a parent and I am EVEN MORE CONVINCED this stuff is critical. Let’s back it up a bit, in this blog series we are talking about how kiddos develop in a way that allows them to produce age appropriate speech sounds. These steps include:
This specific blog touches on point number 4, sounds in isolation. Isolation means all by themselves, so we need to practice sounds first all by themselves before we can practice putting them into words which are combining multiple sounds together. Oftentimes words are spelt differently in English than we pronounce them, so especially for children who are not yet reading, naming the sounds by their characteristics instead of the letter name is often helpful. For example, you may call the “S” sound a snake sound since it could be spelt like /s/ as in “sun” or C as in “Ace”. Naming the attribute of the sound to something the child is already familiar with and can be seen in a picture will often help them learn this sound more quickly.
Does this all make sense? We need to start with good resting posture of our tongue and mouth, move into controlling the articulators, and then improve our awareness of how to move them on purpose! Finally babies learn how to make these sounds alone and then combine these sounds into different words, which is blog post number 5, tune back in to learn more!!
-Kasey-