Any SALT's here?

[jofeb04]

Hiya,

My dd (4 - 5 in September) is seeing a SALT and has been for six months. Dd struggles with quite a few sounds, using g for f amongst others.

Her speech has improved (especially when she concentrates), but as she is not due to see the SALT until she is settled in reception, we are just wondering what we can do over the summer holidays.

We are concerned about how she will cope with learning phonics in school, as she is unable to say the letters.

Thanks

My DS (5) has been seeing SALT since he was 3 and also has problems with g and f but this isn't uncommon.

The reason she's saying to wait is to see how your dd improves once she starts daily school phonics and trust me, she'll improve a lot. It really does make a huge difference. Our SALT goes into class too to observe the kids so they can see how much intereaction there with other kids and if they understand what DS is saying..........and they all do!

We had a sheet for c, g, and f sounds for him to practice and he can now do all of the sounds.

So words like leaf, knife, roof, gate, goat, ghost etc are good ones for dd to practice. Also, silly sounds (foo, far, fo, go ,goo, gar etc)

You could draw pictures and cut them up into cards. You could say the correct word and ask dd to place a counter for example on the right card. This will really make her listen to the correct sounds you're saying.

Then get her to say the sounds when you show her the cards and she gets a point/counter etc. Games using rewards are used by our SALT. I am not a SALT by the way.

Phonics at school helped a lot getting DD to say everything more clearly.
When DS had SALT we had lots of homework and feedback which apparently helped him improve very quickly.

1. Can she hear the difference between f and and g? The first part is helping her hear those differences. You can do lots at home to enunciate the correct sounds, face her fully when you say them so she can see how your mouth and tongue are shaped to make g vs. f sounds.

1. From there you could move on to making sure she knows which sound is which letter (f or g) and getting her to point at f or g when you say a word (or nonsense sound) that starts that start with the f/g sounds.

1. From there you could see if she can sometimes get the f/g right at ends of words rather than starts (for some reason end is easier). Then slur the words together and see if she can copy, like....

"Rough-Fan, can you say that?" And see if she can continue the F sound into the second word without subbing in the G.

That may not be right, but it's the sort of homework/strategies that helped DS.

If she's getting it right most of the time the odds that she will keep self-correcting with only gentle encouragement. Do not stress her with this, keep it fun. They do turn-playing games in DS SALT, like taking a stick out of a Jenga tower, each time the child just tries. And then everyone laughs when the tower finally topples, because it's not about winning.