In this blog series, we’ve been working together to figure out how kids typically develop speech sounds, and what we can do as parents and caregivers to proactively help them improve and set them on the road for success. If you missed our first few blogs, go back and check them out to learn more about considerations of speech sound development and factors that we need to be aware of.
In this blog, I want us to touch on how we can use something we like to call segmentation to help our kids improve their speech production. This might actually sound more like a reading task instead of a speech task, but breaking sounds apart especially in challenging contexts is really helpful for kids. Here’s why.
Below is an outline of how kids typically work through a therapy progression and learn how to make a new sound. The same structure can be used for a child as they learn new sounds, and as you help them practice.
As you can see, kids start off by learning things in isolation, or all by themselves, and when we learn how to put things back together using segmentation, or the slight pause, it is extremely helpful. This can be useful when you are helping your child to place a new sound that they are practicing into a new word. For example, you might break apart, the word “sit” into the “snake sound” followed by “it”. You might break apart the K sound for the word “may” followed by the “K sound” for “make”.
You may also find it helpful to segment when children are learning to combine sounds into blends. You may notice that your child has difficulty with words like “swing” or “play”. This is because they begin with two consonants in a row like PL or SW. We can help our kids by segmenting the S from the “wing” or the P from the “lay”. This is also true when we get up into triple consonant clusters like SKR or SPL words like “splash or squish” are going to be more challenging for your child to coordinate and segmenting can help them hear each individual sound as well as practice producing them.
Check out our blog next time for more ideas about how working on early speech sounds can help your child with some phonological skills which are necessary for literacy down the road. Until next time!
-Kasey