how to encourage fluency in a six year old

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my almost six year old finds it really hard to relate stories clearly. this has been an issue for a while and we had him checked by a speech therapist about eighteen months ago at which point they said it was all fine. an example of his problem - today he was describing how he had explained to his friend how we baked bread yesterday. it took about ten minutes with lots of aaaah-aaaah-aaaahs and word repetitions. school work is going well - although literacy is not as strong as numeracy. he was a late talker because of glue ear and is now a quiet little one. i would love to find a way to help him and find out if there is cause for concern.

Not sure of you mean his words are indistinct or his logical is. It's quite normal for 6 year olds to stammer and take ages over story telling. DS1 used to at that age because his mind ran so far ahead of his mouth that he forgot where his mouth was at, telling the story, and had to backtrack several times to remember. He's fine now, and very good at literacy.

To help, maybe you could play games together. You can get story cards that encourage children to build up stories in sections. Or you could play imaginative games. Tell a story by taking turns doing one sentence each. Or play 'pretend' and you be the news journalist asking him about an event. If you ask very simple questions like 'where was that? What time of day did it happen' etc he'll pick up how to break info down into simple chunks.

(You can do the same by 'writing' a book together. He tells the story, you write it down, but actually you keep prompting with questions that limit the length of his answers and build up the story gradually.

Thanks for your fab suggestions. It's also good to know it's relatively normal. None of his friends are like that though to be honest. He takes time over the logic - the words are clear. The logic is all there though - when I jumped ahead on the steps to make the bread I was quickly corrected!

DS had issues with that as part of wider speech problems. They worked on it gradually, first starting with single cards of silly things - for example, a person eating a flower or an adult sitting in a baby chair. DS had to try and say what he could see. Then they moved on to two image stories. For example, a teddy playing football in a garden and second image, he kicked the ball over the fence. What is teddy doing? What happened to the ball? How do you think he feels about the ball?

Then they moved on to three page stories, etc. We also had some sequencing puzzle cards simiar to these: www.learningresources.co.uk/product/sequencing+puzzle+cards.do

Then you can work on reading a story and asking him to 'predict' what will happen next. You can also talk to him about words that are tools to tell a story such as 'first', 'then', 'afterwards', 'in the end', etc.