Hello Family Chatterbox Families!
Welcome back to our blog series on early speech sound development, and our journey through different tips and tricks that will set your child up for success not only for how clear their speech sounds, but also setting the foundational skills needed for strong reading in the future. In this final blog in this series, I wanted to highlight a few things.
Number one, everything that I have suggested over the course of the last five blogs have been meant as an encouragement for parents, to find fun and engaging ways to introduce these concepts to their children. I in no way expect you to sit down and drill speech sounds or articulation cards with your two-year-olds. However, if you can figure out fun ways to incorporate drinking through straws, blowing bubbles at bathtime, hearing sounds during play or even beginning to practice noticing letters and sounds during every day life… I encourage it!
Number two, in this blog I wanted to talk about phonological skills and how they go hand-in-hand with your child’s ability to speak and read. Phonological, skills or phonemic awareness are terms that encompass a child’s ability to hear sounds within words, understand rhymes, and blend sounds together to make new words. During our time together, we have talked about ways to help your child learn new speech sounds, and in the process practice some early literacy skills, like identifying sound within words, breaking those sound apart, and blending those sounds back together. These will be essential skills for your child to learn as they begin reading. We don’t expect kids to be learning to read at a crazy young age, but we can point out sounds that they hear an even different ways to talk about letter sounds that will help them be more in tune and prepared for the skills they need for reading.
Some of our favorites for “renaming” sounds include the “snake sound” for S or C. We also love talking about our “buzzy bee” sound for Z. If you’re interested in getting some of the materials or visuals that we use for these activities, feel free to send us a message, and we would love to send you our visuals and a video explaining how we use them.
Thank you so much for following along with us on this adventure, we always value your feedback, and get all of our topic ideas from our most commonly ask questions from our families. We’ll see you next time!
-Kasey