‘Sound Play’ with Speech and Language Therapists
Highly Specialist Speech and Language Therapists Rhian Hoccom, Lisa Farquhar and Helene Somerville discuss the benefits of ‘Sound Play’ and how you can help support your child’s speech through their special books and CLAPA’s ‘Babble and Play’ sessions.
As speech and language therapists, we enjoy nothing more than the opportunity to provide ideas to parents and carers on how they can help develop their children’s speech. Offering ‘Babble and Play’ sessions and coffee clubs for CLAPA has become a regular feature in our calendar and we are delighted to be able to support the amazing work that they do. Supporting families is also at the heart of what we do, and these sessions allow us to reach more families and share the benefits of sound play.
Sound Play is simple and something that anyone can do. More than this, we know it works.
When modelling sounds for our little ones, we never ask them to copy, but we do encourage them to look at our mouth – this way, we have their attention, and they can see how the sound is made. Our top tip to help this is to hold up an object or toy close to our mouth while making a sound. Some of our favourite toys to use include bubbles, puppets and believe it or not, cotton reels!
Simply repeating sounds on their own and in words as often as possible throughout the day will help children to store those sounds in their memory until they are ready to attempt the sounds themselves.
The best sounds to start modelling are the ‘front’ sounds, such as p,b,t,d and ‘sh’ as they are the most visual sounds. We would always recommend making these sounds gently while up close and face-to-face with your child.
It’s not only about setting specific time aside to play; sounds can also be modelled during daily activities such as bath time and teatime. Bubbles in the bath can say ‘pop’, and the dripping tap may say ‘t..t..t..’. . We might make the sound ‘fffffff’ while blowing our food to cool it.
With this in mind, and with the aim of making modelling sounds even easier for families, we teamed up to create our Sound Play books ‘The Sound We Found’, and ‘The Sound We See’. These books follow Baby Bear through a daily routine where sounds are modelled. More recently, we have partnered with The Welsh Government to publish a Welsh version of the books and with speech and language therapy colleagues from Florida International University to translate the books into Spanish. We have lots of ideas for future books, all centred around encouraging speech sound development and we look forward to working on these.
We have continued to receive positive feedback from parents, grandparents, teachers and fellow speech and language therapists and have been thrilled to hear how our books are making a difference. Why not sign up to one of our ‘Babble and Play sessions’ hosted by CLAPA, where you will hear a reading of one of our books and we will enjoy sharing our sound play ideas with you?
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