Wordy Wednesday: Listening Ears!

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Happy Wednesday, friends! It’s time to put on your listening ears, because today we bring you a set of images that represent minimal pairs – two words that differ from each other by only a single sound. One little phoneme often makes all the difference in language: it can turn the beach into a peach, or a bug into a bus, or a ship into a sheep. These minute phonemic deviations can have a tremendous impact on the message.

Sometimes, children have articulation difficulties in which they have trouble producing a target sound, even though they can hear the distinction perfectly well. Often, such

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difficulties are limited to just a few sounds, with the child making predictable substitutions (such as /sh/ for /s/ and vice versa). The trick with these guys is practice, practice, practice language production. Give verbal cues to help teach the correct mouth posture (“make your snaky sound!” works well with little guys), and help the child concentrate on where his lips, tongue, and teeth should be.

Practicing minimal pairs can also be useful receptive language practice. Some kids may have difficulty hearing or understanding the difference between phoneme sounds; in some cases, this may be due to hearing impairment, but in many cases the issue is more

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cognitive or attentional. Present a minimal pair of pictures, then ask the child to point to (or hand you) one of them. Don’t be discouraged if it seems challenging at first! Just keep practicing!

When your child has mastered this auditory discrimination task, you can ratchet up the difficulty in a few ways. Add background noise to your environment (music, conversation, television); this makes discerning the minute differences between these pairs of words more challenging, which requires the child to use more attentional resources. Or incorporate multi-step instructions into the activity: “First, write your name, then hand me the peach.” This introduces a memory component to the activity as well; the child first has to distinguish the correct item, then she must hold that information in memory for a short time before acting on it.

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We hope your week is wonderfully wordy!

~ Growing Kids Therapy Center

Wordy Wednesday: Get Your Gobble On!

Happy Wednesday, friends! This week, we bring you a collection of Thanksgiving-themed pictures from around the web to spark language with your little ones in the upcoming holiday week. Like our recent Story Time post, these pictures lend themselves to language work at multiple levels. Work on receptive and expressive vocabulary. Ask the child to point to items as you name them (receptive language), or have him name objects in a scene (expressive). Use some of the tricky letter sounds that surround Thanksgiving to work on articulation. (Turkey can be such a troublesome word!)

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At the discourse or pragmatic level, these pictures can be used to generate stories. Have the child describe scenes in detail, making sure to provide the story essentials: who is there, what are they doing, where are they, when is this taking place, why might this be happening? Ask the child to relate some of these pictures to her own family Thanksgiving celebrations, or have her tell you the history of Thanksgiving. For more advanced kids, you might have them do a bit of research on Thanksgiving traditions and rituals online, then tell you what they learned. Humor is another higher-order language skill that can be difficult to teach or explain. Some of these pictures are subtly silly (and some are not so subtle). If your kiddo finds one of these pictures amusing, have her explain why it’s funny. Sometimes, the humor comes from word play, other times from more slapstick or physical silliness.

Since we love activities that work on multiple skills at once while injecting some fun, you

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can use these pictures to sneak in some fine motor work alongside your language and cognitive tasks. Have your child write a story about one of the pictures or draw his own version of a scene.

From the Growing Kids family to yours, have a wonderfully Wordy Wednesday, and a safe and happy Thanksgiving! ~Elizabeth and Melanie

Wordy Wednesday: Baby It’s Cold Outside!

Happy Wednesday, friends, and happy Halloween! In honor of the recent Frankenstorm that has plagued the East Coast, this week’s words are all about weather!

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Practice receptive vocabulary by having the child point to (or hand you) the picture for cloudy, tornado, etc. as you ask for them. Or have the child label the picture (either out loud or in writing) to work on expressive language.

Talking about the weather can also be a good way to tap into higher order cognitive skills. You might work on cognitive schemas (sometimes called situational scripts or routines). If the child can label rainy, for example, what can he tell you about rainy days?

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What do you wear? What are some things you do on rainy days?  Some scientists believe that the human brain processes certain types of information using some stored representations, or schemas. You can probably, for example, readily recite some typical accessories and activities associated with rainy days. If you have some mental template for how rainy days usually go, then you don’t have to carefully scrutinize every minute detail about this particular rainy day to have a good idea of how it will go.

Some of our kiddos are very fond of the ‘What’s the Weather?’ song. (For those of you unacquainted, I tried but YouTube doesn’t have the version we use…) One younger client and I have made it into part of our therapy routine: we sing the song together then run to the window to assess the

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weather outside. This is usually followed up with a song (spontaneously offered by the client) about that day’s weather conditions: Mr. Sun, You are my Sunshine, Itsy Bitsy Spider (if it’s raining). Sing weather songs of your own, and use this week’s pictures to illustrate!

Let us know how you use our Wordy Wednesdays! ~Elizabeth and Melanie

Wordy Wednesday: Story Time!

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Happy Wednesday, readers! This week, we bring you a set of wacky and absurd scenes intended to get your little linguist chattering!

Our story starter images can be used to work on language production at several levels. At the most basic, simply ask the child to describe what is happening in the scene. (“The man and the tigers are taking a bath.” “Two women are drinking coffee at a table.”) Beyond the level of basic description, the sky is truly the limit! Encourage the child to expand his story from what is purely observable to make inferences and hypotheses.

Many of this week’s pictures were intentionally selected to be funny or bizarre, which makes them great for pragmatic work. If your kid laughs (as one of my clients often does at some of these images), ask what makes this picture funny. Use pictures to spark conversation about cause and effect relationships (What would happen if …? What could have led up to this scenario?). Talk about feelings: How do you think the man feels? Why? How would you feel in this situation? Emotions are a good opportunity to work on theory of mind*, a concept that some researchers hypothesize is absent or underdeveloped in individuals on the autism spectrum. Make connections! Have the child describe a similar event from her own life.

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I’ve started using images such as these with a teenage client, who really enjoys the deviation from rote rehearsal of language activities. I use this activity as a way to practice providing appropriate levels of detail in story telling. Obviously, for a story to be interesting, the teller should provide ample detail, but it can be hard to determine which details are relevant information and which are extraneous or irrelevant. At this stage, my client and I view an image together and he describes the scene. I provide prompting questions when needed to flesh out his description: Who is in the picture? Where are they? What is happening? Once I’m satisfied with his verbal description of the scene, I ask him to write a few sentences about the picture. Often his written description is more complex! This exercise allows us to practice several things: the basics of spelling and grammar in written expression, translating information from visual to verbal to written form and holding information in working memory as we move between modalities, in addition to all of the pragmatic language concepts mentioned above. 

We hope you can put these story starter pictures to good use! If you have ideas for future Wordy Wednesday topics, please share them with us in the comments!

Happy Wednesday from Growing Kids Therapy!

~Melanie and Elizabeth

* theory of mind: the capacity to attribute mental states (e.g. thoughts, feelings, beliefs, etc.) to oneself and others, as well as to recognize that others may have mental states that differ from one’s own

Wordy Wednesday: Falling into Autumn

Happy Wednesday, dear readers! As I scraped the ice off my windshield this morning before embarking on my commute (brrrr!), I looked around at all the beautiful colors and decided it was high time to feature this wonderful season in a Wordy Wednesday post before it turns into winter. So we’ve gathered up a set of fall’s finest words to share with you!

As always, you can use our pictures to work on receptive and expressive vocabulary. Present a few images and ask “Where is the pumpkin?” (receptive), or show a single image and have the child label it (expressive). Practice spelling and writing the words with more advanced kiddos.

We’ve included several fall holidays, some of which are pretty familiar to most children and some of which may not be as well known. Use these holiday images to spark discussion, which may require a little research, about cultural practices. Why do we celebrate the holidays we do? What is the history and significance behind them? Why aren’t holidays the same all over the world? 

These pictures can also serve as a springboard to work on conceptual relationships by playing one of our favorite (as-yet unnamed) therapy games. We choose a target word (in the picture below fall, but you could use any of these pictures as a target for this game), then set a timer and write down as many related words as we can think of
in a set amount of time. Then we discuss the words each of us has written. Points are
assigned based on relatedness to the target word, with very closely associated words (essential to the definition of the target) earning 3 points and words that are completely out in left field (aka YIKES!) earning 0 points. I’m sharing the target we use for scoring here, but keep an eye out for an updated version (inspired by one of my young friends).

Wishing you a thoroughly Wordy Wednesday! ~ Elizabeth and Melanie

Wordy Wednesday: A-B-Coloring

This week’s Wordy Wednesday brings together two of our favorite things: crayons and letters! Our set of ABC coloring pages is perfect for bringing a little bit of activity into your language practice, or for bringing some language into a fun fine motor activity.

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With the littlest of linguists, you can work on expressive language:  ask the child to identify crayon colors, to label each picture before coloring, etc. Coloring is excellent fine motor work and an important precursor to learning to write. We deliberately selected fairly simple images for this set to make it easier for those with less developed fine motor skills. If your child is struggling to color in the lines, try this simple trick: outline the edges of each image with Elmer’s white glue and let dry for several hours. Then the image has a clear raised line that can act as a physical barrier to help keep those crayons in the lines!

Learning to recognize letters and the sounds they make is an essential step in learning to read. Practice phoneme-grapheme awareness (identifying the letters and the sounds they make) as you go along. We’ve included both uppercase and lowercase letters together along with lowercase letters alone, because we’ve noticed that some of our young clients have trouble with the lowercase alphabet.  

Coloring can also be a good activity for sneaking in some bonus pragmatic language work. We like to allow the kiddos only one crayon at a time when we’re working in structured activities. When the child is ready for a different color, she needs to make a verbal request to get the desired color. In addition, we often involve a client’s siblings during home-based therapy sessions, and coloring offers a semi-structured activity for this group time. It’s a great opportunity to foster turn-taking and sharing, and it can also be a good chance to encourage the children to have a conversation about what they’re doing. 

For more advanced children, you might use the coloring pages as a springboard for more language activity. Have children begin by coloring the item pictured, then practice writing and spelling as they come up with additional items that start with the same letter.

We hope you’ll tell us how you put our Wordy Wednesdays to use. And if there is something you’d like to see featured in a future post, be sure to let us know!

Wishing you all a wonderfully Wordy Wednesday! ~Melanie and Elizabeth

Wordy Wednesday: Get Personal!

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Who cares about language? Well, we do! This week’s Wordy Wednesday gets personal with a set of cards for working on the concept of who, one of the all-important wh-questions: who, what, where, when, why and how. Over the next couple of months, we’ll be bringing you cards for all of the wh-questions, but today we’re starting with who questions. You might be asking yourself: Why would I want to work on those questions? When should my child be mastering these concepts? Where can I find materials and ideas for strengthening these skills? Stay tuned to our blog to find out!

CLICK THE IMAGE to download images with who questions.

Arguably, who is the most basic of the wh-questions; children typically have words for the specific people most important to their lives (mama, dada) before anything else.* As with most aspects of language, children have the capacity to understand and even answer the question well before they can ask the question themselves. As usual, comprehension/receptive language precedes expression/production.

CLICK to download who pictures four-per-page, great for receptive language practice!

Wh-questions are one area in which children with language delays show particular difficulty. Research based on naturalistic observations suggests that children with language delays tend to ask fewer questions in general than those whose language develops typically. Children on the autism spectrum may especially struggle with who questions, perhaps due to the social deficits characteristic of ASD. These difficulties may come out of a lack of linguistic sophistication, from disengagement or a lack of interest in others, or both.

How can you use these who cards?

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1.  Practice receptive language by presenting a few images (without words) at a time. Ask the child “Who helps us when we are sick?” He responds by pointing at or handing you the picture of a doctor. For reluctant responders, use positive reinforcers frequently. (We’re big on social praise around here [e.g. high fives, fist bumps, loud cheering, hugs], and with especially squirmy or non-compliant kids we give very specific requests and rewards: “Let’s do three more cards, then you can have a sticker/take a coloring break/get up and stretch.”
2. Work on expressive language by presenting the images one at a time and ask the child “Who teaches us in school?” She should respond verbally by saying “Teacher!” or “A teacher teaches us in school” depending on her abilities. If the child is having a hard time answering the question, it may help to use our oft-repeated phrase: “Who means a person!”
   

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3. Scale up the challenge a notch by having the child ask the who questions. A child who can read may benefit from reading the question directly from the card. You can fade this written prompt as the child becomes familiar with the conversational exchange of asking a question and waiting for the answer. With many of our older clients who’ve been in speech-language therapy for a while, we find that they’ve had a lot of practice answering questions but not a lot of experience asking the questions. At first, a child learning to ask questions may immediately answer his own question. Don’t get discouraged! Have him slow down, ask the question, then STOP! and wait for an answer. You can say something like, “Now it’s my turn to answer.”
4. Build a little fine motor activity into the mix. Have the child ask you questions as above, then write your answers. This also forces the child to listen actively and processyour responses. If she is struggling with this activity, try having her listen to
   

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   your response then repeat it aloud before starting to write.

5. Of course, who practice shouldn’t be all about flashcards. Sprinkle who questions throughout your day: ask who questions about the books you read, who questions about your child’s friends, who questions about the family.

How will you make use of this week’s Wordy Wednesday? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Happy Wednesday! ~Melanie and Elizabeth

*Children typically begin speaking, including words for mom and/or dad, between 9 and 15 months. If a child isn’t producing these words exactly within this time frame, don’t panic! Experts consider a number of factors in addition to chronological age when trying to determine whether a child’s language development is on track, and we’ll be posting about these nuances here in the near future.