By McKenzie Lee, M.S., CCC-SLP
1. Does your child receive both speech therapy at school and through a private practice? Ask for and sign the Release of Information so that your school SLP can independently communicate with your private SLP via email or phone.. this way, these two SLPs can chat about your child and their goals and progress.
2. When you see a worksheet sent home that your child completed in Speech, ask them to tell you about it. This is a sneaky way of having your child practice their speech sounds/language skills an extra time!
3. If your child is working on speech sounds: set yourself a timer for 5 minutes (or 2 minutes, if that makes more sense) and prompt them to try to use their best speech sounds in that time frame while conversing. This could be in the car on the way to school, at the dinner table, or when going to bed at night.
4. Email your school SLP to check on your child’s progress on their goals and to ask how to specifically target your child’s objectives at home. I can guarantee that they will welcome your interest in wanting to target your child’s skills!
5. When reading with your child, point out instances where you observe their speech-language targets being included! If your child is working on /S/ sounds, you can point out “Hey! The character Sally has your speech sound in it!” If you know your child is working on concepts (i.e., over, on), you can say “Look at that cow jumping over the moon!” Or “Oh dear, the monkeys are jumping on the bed! They’re not supposed to do that!”
