need some help from all you clever people please

[beautifulgirls]

I need some new inspiration to help DD#1 with her speech therapy. She is three and a half now and been seeing a speech therapist for over a year. We are trying so hard to get her listening to things to help her understanding and one of the exercises we have tried, failed at, left alone come back to a few weeks on..repeat...is to try and separate out two sounds at the start of words. We have numerous pictures of words eg some beginning with f and others with m. Single sounds have been learned by her on a picture basis - ie m words are known as motorbike sounds Mmmmmm (with a cue card picture of motorbike) and f words are known as firework soudsn Ffffff (cue card firework) - she can readily look at the cue card and now make the single sounds so she does understand that bit. We show her the picture eg "face" and ask her if she can her that it starts with a Ffff or an Mmmm sound. We have tried getting her to put the pictures into sorted piles next to the cue cards, put sweets in selected containers instead of having too many pictures to confuse her - so we just say it after a brief show of the picture then take the picture away. The sounds we use are always very different so should be easy to hear in a word. She just isn't getting what we are trying to do with her at all though.

Does anyone (teacher types perhaps?) have any inspiring ideas to try and help us teach her to understand the concept of what we are trying to do. I have also repeated ad nauseum lists of ffff words and mmm words, divided them up myself telling her what I am doing so she sees by example too - no joy.

This is obviously only a small part of what we do at speech therapy and I am pleased to say she is making reasonable progress with the rest of what we are up to, all be it we still have a lot of work to do. Her hearing we know to be fine now though she did have issues until she had grommets in her ears. Speech wise there is a suspicion of verbal dyspraxia.

Maybe she is really just too young to grasp this, but the speech therapist seems to think not and has been spot on with all of the other things we have done with her and the age related times for doing things.

Thanks - frustrated mum!

[TotalChaos]

Is the exercise you describe to help her with her understanding? or does she have problems speaking these letters?

[beautifulgirls]

She did have a lot of problem saying them but we have worked on them as single sounds then moved onto putting them into words and in general she is getting them reasonably well when she says them now - which in many ways is more important to me right now than hearing the differences, but obviously the speech therapist works on more than just how to say it.
We do a lot of other things like concentration exercises (eg jigsaws etc) and memory games etc too.

[TotalChaos]

The exercises I've been given for DS for understanding are pretty tedious - of the - Put the little teddy bear on the little bus/ Put the big giraffe on the little bridge variety. Nothing like what you have described, but then again DS doesn't have any pronunciation/articulation problems.

DS nursery routinely has children distinguishing between the sounds of different musical instruments as part of the build up to pre-reading skills, don't know if that would be of any interest to you?

[beautifulgirls]

Certain things she can definately hear and distinguish - like tapes of different animal noises, or common sounds (hoover etc). I think it is more a case of trying to get her to understand that words are made up of different sounds and that will lead onto later on breaking down difficult words into smaller pieces to put together. That said if I break longer words down and practice them with her she can gradually get there. My gut feeling is that she is still a bit young, against what the speech therapist is saying, but I guess time will tell.

I know what you mean about some of the exercises! We have modified a lot of the ones we have been given and thankfully our speech therapist is very keen to encourage that sort of thing to get the child as interested as poss - they are all different after all. We have found that bribery gets us a HUGE amount of concentration compared to no bribery! M&Ms are the source of all happiness in our house just dont tell our dentist!!! They make great counters for putting on pictures, or sorting into containers etc etc and you can play with lots of them at a time but only allow one to be eaten at the end of a particular exercise when it is completed. Having them visible for her was so much better than the promise of a sweet later if she was a good girl.

[TotalChaos]

fortunately one of our nearby playgrounds has different coloured "bridges" on a swing/climbing playframe, so it's easy to get DS to go on or under different ones

All I can think of is whether you can ditch the cards and work on words that DD likes using in day to day life - playground/toys/food etc for this exercise to give her more of an interest in it?

[beautifulgirls]

It was my idea to back off keep showing her the pictures on the cards, and just use a quick glance initially to reinforce what she was hearing - I thought it was working last week, but it seems to be totally random in her choices again this week. I agree maybe we just need to make an effort to bring it into day to day chat and emphasize those words to her when they come up. We have enough else to do when we sit down to practice our sounds anyway!
Thank you for your input and good luck with your DS.