How to approach this?

[2kidsintow]

One of my pupils does not clearly say the sound 'th' correctly at all.
He will say "I fink vat vis is free" instead of "I think that this is three".
In a recent spelling test he was clearly miss-spelling words in the similar way as he spells as he says.

I want to broach this with his Mum, BUT.... Mum clearly has a London-ish (sorry if not specific, I teach 'oop North') and I'm aware that she may have some of the same speech habits.

I'm out on the yard at the end of the day on Tuesday and am going to take the opportunity to speak to her if she is there, I just hope I'm not going to embarrass her (or myself!)

If you are a teacher, have you had to do something similar?
If you are a parent, would you want to be told/would you find it embarrassing?

That is a pretty common way of speaking around here unfortunately. My cousin who is a speech therapist said once (this was after a few drinks so I'm not sure how serious she was!) that it would be considered a speech problem in other parts of the country but was just part of the S/E dialect!!

My five-year old does this and we at home certainly do not! Is it just immature speech?

We did quite a bit of work on 'th' rather than 'f' when DS was 4 - suddenly clicked and has been fine after that.

2kids - I would approach it from the Pov that he's struggling to spell things correctly because of saying things like this, and it would be really helpful if he could work on saying the 'th' and practising it at home and being reminded that its 'th' not 'v' or 'f' but make it to do with how he's spelling things rather than an accent ?

When my kids did this, which is very very common in 5 year olds I know, I used to emphasis "th" by poking my tongue out. Which was funny and got the point across.

Mine does this all the time and spells most words with an f instead of th. I don't talk like this so she hasn't got it from me. I thought like labelledame that it was just immature speach.
He teacher hasn't mentioned it to me so I thought it was something they see a lot?

My dh, a cockney, speaks like this, as do his family and friends. Fortunately my dd has never picked this up and speaks with our local accent. If this child's mum is from London it is almost certain that is where it comes from and it may be difficult to deal with.