Speech difficulties and learning to read

[skewiff]

My son has mild CP and this affects his speech. Its not hugely affected ( I don't think). His language seems good.

But he can't say letters such as 's', 'th', 'f', 't', 'sh', 'j', 'ch', 'z' etc He can say these sounds at the end or middle of a word, but just not at the beginning.

People cotton on very quickly to how he speaks and seem to understand most of what he says.

But I'm wondering - when he starts school in September - will not being able to make these sounds hamper his learning of phonics for reading?

Speech and language have been absolutely unkeen to give us any help since we asked for it at 18 months. He's now nearly 4 and I've been letting them know how he's getting on and asking for him to be assessed every 6 months. But we're still getting no help.

Do you think I should be more pushy??

I hope that if school thinks there is a problem then they will get him seen by a SALT - however SALT provision is patchy to say the very least.

Round here it's shocking. We ended up paying for DS to have it (for 2 years).

It definitely helped.

When it come to phonics though - we thought it would be a struggle for him. Not so, in fact, the reverse - learning to read has helped his speech enormously. He's really 'visual' and so he can see the sounds as letters to say them.

Oh good - I wondered if that might be the case.

My son is also very visual.

Thank you.

definately keep pushing for help as SALT input in many areas is woefully inadequate. Go private if you can afford to so you can at least get a better idea of what you should be dealing with.

Having worked with DD on most of these sounds what I would suggest is that you play some games with him where you ask him to start to hear the sounds at the start and/or end of words. Use pictures as well as letters to represent the sounds and get him to point to the correct sound. Start really easy with very different sounds such as "d" and "s" and build up to compare more sounds at once and sounds that are similar such as "sh" and "ch". This will really help him to hear them and then he may have more of a chance to read and write them longer term. Speech therapy as I discovered is a lot more than just making the correct sounds in the correct order.

'learning to read has helped his speech enormously'

Absolutely and my feeling too as a SALT with a particular interest in literacy.

I'm involved in researching the use of this fantastic online reading programme which has a superb evidence base. There are a lot of (very enjoyable) 'speak out loud' activities on it where the child gets to practice sounds and words over and over agian.

We've had some great results with kids with a variety of SN, (including CP) in not just improved reading but better speech, concentration, independent working and comprehension.

One of my top recommendations.

Woops, better tell you what is is eh?

Headsprout

Thank you.

Interesting thread, I've been wondering about this.

Ds attends a nursery attached to a state school and will start reception in September. He has speech delay and I have been wondering what will happen when then start to teach reading, as his talking (and possibly his receptive skills) are just below what appears to be the language level for first reading books.

It's encouraging to hear it may work the other way around though, and reading itself may encourage his speech.

Sorry, forgot to say, the nursery already send books home but we're not having much luck engaging him!

He enjoys looking at books, but the school ones are so dull.

Once he starts getting interested in decoding he may find the most boring book fascinating.

My DS reads everything now.

Yes DD is just starting to read (they learn later here 'cause we are in France) and she's LOVING it. It's a system that she can decode. She's romping ahead on her book and I have to keep holding her up to make sure she's understood it.
Will definitely do some more headsprout with her later in the year but for now we are letting her concentrate on French (syllabic rather than phonetic, so slightly different system). I'm sure it's going to make a huge difference to her language(s).

Oh I hope so. I am a complete bookworm, always have been.

When I first realised he was having some difficulties (no dx yet) I felt my biggest grief for the little bookworm I thought I was going to create (not to say he wont be, but I little knowledge of sn then)

Moondog, I;m interested in finding out more about this program. Is it america? Isn't that a problem with pronunciation of letters z for example? Is it worth buying a 'learning to read' strategy?

Cheers

dd2 has cp, and we were told she was unlikely to be verbal as a result of her oral motor difficulties. we started her with makaton on the advice of slt (really interesting as her fine motor was also affected lol), but she did develop very dysarthric speech around 3. she was dx spastic quad at the time.

she learnt to read well before school, and her lack of speech has had no affect on her reading ability at all. in fact, we didn't realise how much she could read until her speech caught up. it's still dysarthric, but at 7 she has an above average vocabulary and reading level.

i should add - we didn't teach her to read. we read to her a lot, and she listened to us reading with her brother and sister, and somewhere along the line worked out how to do it herself.

i'm a big fan of makaton as it seemed to give her the 'signs mean words' idea, and i think this just followed through with the written 'signs' on book pages. both makaton and reading definitely helped her speech. we used the nuffield dyspraxia programme for her speech as well, which gives both pictorial and written sounds to promote speech.

DS2 is 4.5yrs and has speech and language delays, with difficulty pronouncing some letters. It doesn't seem to have caused any problems with his reading or phonics, in fact, I have to agree with others that because he is a very visual learner, the reading seems to be helping to some degree.

I'm also seeing an improvement in ds's speech since he's started learning to read. Difficult to tell whether it's causal because of the confounding with other factors (starting school, new people around, new teacher, new SALT) but it's interesting to hear other people saying the same.

Btw ds's old SALT had said he would probably find reading difficult because of his speech problems. Whilst I can see that might be true of some types of speech disorders, I didn't really see how that would work for ds's particular problems. That's one of the reasons she's now his "old SALT".

Yes Will but ut doesn't matter particularly.

In any case, the system used is a phonics one so 'z' is not bronounced 'seee' but, quite literally, 'z'.

I don't know what you mean about buying a 'learning to read' strategy.
It is that-a programme that takes you on the journey of learning to read!

Sorry, I meant 'zeeee' not 'seeee' as I wrote.

I posted about this previously. DS is still too young for school, but is asking about words and recognising letters. SALT is very helpful because a lot of work there on initial sounds, which he maps to Phonics cards during games.

Two nights ago we were reading a book and he went through a whole page telling me what each sound of each word was. I repeated them 'correctly' and, to my surprise, he then blended the words. And this isn't any SEN trained teacher, just someone muddling through reading to their kids, so I suspect with proper help dyspraxia can be addressed and reading learnt.

Bless him, blending before he can speak clearly! I love my little star!

I wonder what reading teaching method they use in yr area the usual phonics or Ruth Miskin my school (pre school and the first) were using the usual phonics and my son who ASD was very behind when he went to middle school he improved over the next few months as soon as we changed to the ruth miskin method of learning to read which is synthetic phonics and made a huge difference to him , just a thought to maybe look into at some stage

Dd2 has a severe language delay and ASD, she started school in September, doing phonics has improved her speach and she is reading at home (not at school because they seem to think she can't ). Dd2 plays alpha blocks on cbeebies web site which has really helped her with sounding out letters and reading.

My DS has just turned 5 and he has issues with missing the ends off his words and phonological disorder. Since he has been learning to read with phonics at school his speech has improved significantly. His school use the jolly phonics system which the salt also used. The jolly phonics song is on YouTube along with the pictures showing the lyrics and actions. He loves us putting it on and singing together doing the actions. When he is decoding the words in his reading book if he gets confused I do the action and he instantly remembers the letter.