Here are a few tips on how to help your child carryover learned speech/language skills from school to home. The more your child practices skills in multiple environments, the faster these skills will become a part of his/her everyday life.
- Keep in touch with your child's teacher and therapists to see what new skills he/she is learning.
- If your child is working on improving his/her articulation skills, listen for error sounds and provide a correct model - gently correct- praise all efforts.
- Listen carefully to your child's language production. If you hear grammatical errors provide a model - gently correct - praise all efforts.
- Help your child verbally identify items by their correct vocabulary name (example: say 'train' instead of 'choo choo')
- It is always helpful to add visual cues when learning language and speech skills. If your child is working on improving a speech sound, write the word down and show them the letter in the word on which they are working. If your child is working on adding words to his/her sentence, hold up one finger for each word you want them to say in the sentence. Be creative with visual cues, they are always helpful when learning new skills and when practicing them!
- It is more beneficial to work on skills for small amounts of time, multiple times throughout the day, rather than working for 30 minutes or more consecutively. Catching kids in the moment, naturally, can help solidify skills and can make more sense for kids to see how these skills fit into their everyday speech.
- Become a parent who really listens to not only what their child is saying but how their child is saying it!