Beyond Words Speech-Language Consultants Regina
#103 - 4701 Parliament Ave. S4W 0T9 Regina, SK, Canada

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Our team has had a great time celebrating Better Speech and Hearing Month by sharing fun speech -language building activities with you! Here is a great one to end the month! Grab some play-doh and some cookie cutters. Pretend to make cookies and as you make them you can talk about how you need to roll, squish, and press the dough before you make the cookies. You could talk about the shapes that you make the cookies (i.e., animals, stars, letters, etc.). What other bakery trea...ts can you make? Another idea is to let your child make their own creature. You can then play with the creatures and ask what they are doing? What are they eating? Where is it going? This activity is great for building new vocabulary, following directions, and answering WH-questions (i.e., who, what, where, when, why).

Here's a fun language activity for little artists out there! You need two people, two pieces of paper, two sets of crayons, and something large to use as a barrier. Make sure each person has paper and a set of crayons. Place the barrier in between the two of you so that you can't see the other person's picture. One person adds to their picture and describes to the other person:... -what they're drawing -where they're drawing it -what size and colour it is The other person needs to try and draw the exact same thing on their picture! Take turns adding to the picture. This activity works on giving and following directions, describing words, and teamwork!

During supper, or before bed is a great time to have a conversation about Ups and Downs. You can play this game with your whole family, or sometimes this is a nice way for adults to connect individually with children. Take a quiet moment, free from other distractions and interruptions to talk about what your child’s up point or best part of their day was? What was a down or boring/sad/frustrating part of their day? Ask questions/make comments to keep the conversation goi...ng: Tell me more about why that was an up/down part of your day? Who was there? Where did this happen? Engage in problem solving: I wonder how we could have more parts of the day that make you feel like that. I wonder what we could do so that doesn’t happen again. Make sure you take a turn to tell the Ups and Downs of your day too! This part is important! Tips and why it helps: Children learn a significant amount of language through conversations with adults. Through conversation, children have an opportunity to practice asking and answering questions, hearing new words, staying on topic, and talking about ideas/experiences beyond the here and now. Through attentive conversations with adults, children learn to take the perspective of others, solve problems, and retell events from their experiences. Adults support this language learning through modeling appropriate comments (That must have made you feel really upset.), modeling retelling events with relevant information (The strangest thing happened this morning.), and asking questions to help keep the conversation going (What did you do next?).

Look outside every morning and talk about the weather. If you have a calendar you can draw the sun, clouds, or rain etc. You can talk about how things change in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Talk about what you would wear for the weather, how different types of weather feels on your body, and some things you can do in the weather. This activity gives you the opportunity to use lots descriptive words and model detailed sentences with your child!

Here is a fun way to build language! No materials needed, just your family members!! Have your family line up from tallest to shortest, then shortest to tallest! Each time you line up, talk about who is first, who is last, and who is in the middle. Who is in front of you, who is behind you? How many other ways can you line up? (hint: try youngest to oldest next!) This activity is full of opportunities to practice basic concepts! Basic concepts are terms that are essential for children to understand in order to accurately follow directions. Basic concepts help describe location (e.g., in front, behind); direction (e.g., through, up, down); quantity (e.g., some, many); sequence (e.g., first, next, last); characteristics (e.g., old, new); size; shape; colour & much more!

Children love sensory bins! They are a great opportunity for building language skills during play! Find a container that is small enough for your child to sit on the floor with and still be able to reach inside. Pour enough of a safe material that you have on hand (e.g., rice, pasta, water) in the container to cover the container 2-3 inches high. ... Find scoops (e.g., spoons, cups, plastic bowls, ladles) and let your child explore the bin! As an added bonus: hide some of your child’s small toys (e.g., dinosaurs, puzzle pieces, small animals) in the bin for them to find! Sensory bins are a great way to build vocabulary such as verbs: (e.g., scoop, pour, stir, dump, find, hide) and basic concepts (empty, full, small, big, in, out). Sensory bins are also a great way to increase your child’s sentence length (e.g., you can practice saying: I found a _____; I’m hiding a _______)

Build speech and language with toy cars! Build a road or race track out of cards, use a race car if your child has one. Practice saying ready, set, go, before your child pushes their car along the road. After a few rounds, model Ready, set, ______ and then WAIT for your child to say, go before pushing their car.... Ready, set, go can be a motivating phrase for your child to learn - it means something exciting is about to happen! Waiting is also an important strategy for parents to use, as it allows time and space for children to process words and respond! Giving children a routine phrase to complete such as Ready, set, _____(go) helps build language and functional vocabulary! Alternative - if your child is working on speech sounds, you can make a road out of their speech sound flashcards - stop at each card and say the target word.

Practice speech with this packing, memory game! Start by saying I’m going on a trip and I’m bringing a _______ in my suitcase. Insert a word that starts with your child’s speech sound target. Take turns thinking of words that start with your child’s speech sound target until your suitcase is full (i.e., either keep going until you run out of ideas, or set a number of items in your suitcase).... This is a no prep activity that helps children produce many repetitions of their target sound, and can be done almost anywhere (think: classic road trip game). Alternative: Choose a category (e.g., food, instruments, toys, vehicles, animals) and name as many members as the category as you can to fill your suitcase. This variation helps build vocabulary! Advanced alternative: have your child name something that starts with the sound your item ended with: for example: you start with boat, your child could say top, then on your turn, you could say pasta. Be careful! Sounds don’t always correspond to letters (i.e., you couldn’t pack a rainbow and then a watermelon, but you could pack a rainbow and then some oats!!). This variation helps children build their phonological awareness skills that are important for literacy!

Get creative with your next game of hopscotch! Start with the traditional numbered squares, but you can quickly switch to different actions: CLIMBING a chalk ladder, BALANCING on a line, LEAPING over a river (draw squiggly lines for river), etc. Brainstorm lots of different items to draw, and actions to do on them! This is a great way to introduce your child to new action words. They hear it and try it, to learn what it means!

Today, we bring you PART 3 of 3 in our "Boosting your book reading" series! In this series, one of our speech-language pathologists will give you tips and tricks for adding a bit of extra speech, language, and literacy magic into book time with your kids. Today, Shelby is focused on setting the stage for successful literacy skill development: positive engagement with books and foundation skills for reading and writing. Whenever you're introducing your child to something new, it's about building small, successful experiences, and book reading is no different! Watch for more hints on how to engage your child with books and sneakily work on pre-literacy skills while having fun! > Thanks for tuning in! Let us know in the comments if you enjoyed this video series. What do you want to learn about next? > #betterspeechandhearingmonth

Today, we bring you PART 2 of 3 in our "Boosting your book reading" series! In this series, one of our speech-language pathologists will give you tips and tricks for adding a bit of extra speech, language, and literacy magic into book time with your kids. Today, Shelby is bringing you ideas on incorporating language-building vocabulary activities into your reading time. As self-proclaimed word nerds, we understand the importance of strong vocabulary skills, both for learning to read in the early years and reading to learn later on. Stay tuned tomorrow for part three! > #betterspeechandhearingmonth

Today, we bring you PART 1 of 3 in our "Boosting your book reading" series! In this series, one of our speech-language pathologists will give you tips and tricks for adding a bit of extra speech, language, and literacy magic into book time with your kids. Today, Shelby gives you some advice on how to use books to work on tricky speech sounds. If your child is working on a specific speech sound, you can easily apply these ideas to your speech practice. If your child is not working on a specific sound, you can pick any sound to work on. We would probably suggest the ssssnake ssssound - it's one of our favourites! :D > #betterspeechandhearingmonth

For some parents out there, our recent Apraxia posts may have struck a chord. Maybe you've never heard of Apraxia, but you recognize some of the signs in your little one. Maybe your child is struggling with speech and not making much progress. Maybe your child is diagnosed with Apraxia, but you're wondering what the future holds. We're certainly not fortune tellers, but we can tell you what we've seen for our clients, how to access services in Regina for a first (or second) o...pinions about your child's speech, and where to learn more about Apraxia online. Read on! > 1) Many children with Apraxia of speech go on to use pretty normal speech in their daily lives. They may have residual speech errors that come out when they are tired or stressed. However, some will continue to have difficulty with speech long-term. And then of course, there's the entire range in the middle. Although there is no formula to determine where your child will fall in this range, there are factors we consider when making our best guess. Some risk factors for long-term difficulty include: severity of the Apraxia, presence of other Apraxia-type disoders, presence of concurrent language disorder, and presence of cognitive impairment. If you're wondering about your child in particular, talk to your SLP. 2) What we do know for sure is that children with Apraxia who have access consistent, good-quality speech intervention make more progress towards clear speech compared to those who do not. The motor planning nature of this disorder does not make it a good candidate for the "wait and see" approach. 3) On that note, if you have concerns about your child's speech and/or language development, talk to someone about it sooner than later. You can ask your pediatrician for a referral to a speech-language Pathologist. In Regina, you can self-refer to Wascana Rehabilitation Centre Children's Program for public speech service. You can access the Private Practice listing on the Saskatchewan Association of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists (SASLPA) website to find a private clinician who specializes in Apraxia. If you're unsure where to start, send us a message and we'll send you all the links you'll need to reach out to our local services. 4) If you want more information about Apraxia, we often refer parents to the Apraxia Kids website (apraxia-kids.org) for comprehensive and easy-to-digest information about Apraxia. What are your favourite online resources for Apraxia? Let us know! > Thanks for joining us and learning more about Apraxia of speech. Our clinicians are passionate about working in this area and are ready to field you questions. Send a message our way with you have questions, concerns, or just want to know more. > #betterspeechandhearingmonth #apraxiaawareness #apraxiaofspeech See more

Children with Apraxia of speech show improvements in speech clarity when they attend regular speech therapy. But what happens during these sessions? How is treatment for Apraxia different from any other speech disorder? For answers to these questions and more, keep reading below! > 1) Apraxia of speech is a MOTOR PLANNING disorder. This means that the parts of your body that make speech (e.g.: voice box, tongue, palate, lips) do not work in a coordinated or predictable way wh...en the brain tells them what to do. In other speech disoders, the errors that kids make are often predictable, learned patterns. This different is key in treating Apraxia of speech. 2) The driving force in Apraxia treatment is repetition, repetition, repetition! Because we're trying to retrain the speech system to work together, the system needs a lot of practice with each new thing its trying to learn. 3) Children with Apraxia often keep to rigorous speech therapy schedules. Some kids attend speech therapy 2-4 times per week and do additional practice at home. Again, this frequent and intensive practice is part of treating the motor planning disorder. 4) Cueing is king in Apraxia therapy! Your child's SLP may use mirrors, hand gestures, picture cards, physically moving your child's face, audio-video recordings, or other supports to help your child make tricky speech sounds. Once the SLP finds the supports the child needs to make that tricky sound, we work on slowly and systematically fading those supports so that eventually, they can make that tricky sound independently! 5) While we're working on improving speech clarity, these kids often need better ways to communicate in the present! It's now become common for SLPs to introduce augmented and alternative communication (AAC) systems to help kids with Apraxia communicate with those around them. These supports can look like communication picture books, sign language, or "talking" iPad apps. > The treatment process for Apraxia can be a long, hard road. This is why we think the world of our Apraxia families! Check out our last Apraxia post tomorrow where we'll talk about long-term outcomes for kids with Apraxia, the services you can access here in Regina, and where to get information online. > #betterspeechandhearingmonth #apraxiaawareness #apraxiaofspeech See more

Determining whether a child has Apraxia of speech is not a simple task! A highly-skilled speech-language pathologist needs to examine how the child uses their speech sounds across different contexts. For example, some kids can use more difficult speech sounds when they are asked to carefully copy the therapist, but then have trouble making these sounds during regular conversation. Keep reading for more insights on the Apraxia assessment process! > 1) One of the first things w...e recommend for any child with a speech and/or language delay is a thorough hearing assessment! Get those ears checked! 2) The SLP collects a thorough case history about the child's speech and language development. When were their first words? Did they babble as a baby? Is there any family history of speech or language delays? These are just a few of the important questions your SLP will likely ask. 3) Oral-motor exams look at your child's physical speech structures, like the nose, lips, tongue, and palate. If we see anything unexpected, we can make referrals to other professionals such as dentists, ENT specialists, and neurologists. 4) Speech testing is thorough when Apraxia is suspected, and may take a number of sessions to complete! We try to sample the child's speech across a wide range of difficulties and tasks. We want to know every speech sound your child can make, when they can make it, how it sounds with other speech sounds, and which sounds they can make with help. 5) Language testing is also part of the process! Kids with Apraxia often have very strong language skills, but have difficulty expressive themselves due to difficulties with speech sounds. Assessing language skills helps us to determine whether your child is experiencing a delay specific to speech sounds (like Apraxia) or a mixed speech and language delay. 6) Functional communication is SO important to assess for children with suspected Apraxia of speech. These kids are very prone to frustration with communication, because they know what they want to say but have trouble getting it out! We look at how they are communicating with the different people in their lives and whether that communication is meeting their needs. If it's not, we look at supporting their communication with augmented and alternative communication (AAC). > Like I said, it's a very thorough process, and this is only the tip of the iceberg! There are many factors your SLP is taking into account when assessing your child. Reach out to us with any questions you have about SLP assessment; we'd be happy to chat! > #betterspeechandhearingmonth #apraxiaawareness #apraxiaofspeech See more

Most parents don't come into the speech clinic knowing about Apraxia. But they do often know that there is something that is holding their child back from being able to communicate with their loved ones. Today, let's learn about the common signs and symptoms we see in children with Apraxia of speech. Check it out! > 1) Children with Apraxia are often very quiet babies. They often don't babble or try different sounds as much as you might expect. 2) A child with Apraxia might u...se "pop out" words. For example, your child might suddenly say "Hi Grandma!", but then be unable to say it again when you ask them to repeat it. This is NOT a sign of being lazy; this might be a sign of Apraxia. 3) Apraxia can make it really difficult for kids to learn new speech sounds. A child with apraxia might only use a couple of speech sounds at a time. Some kids with Apraxia use a "default" sound when they want to talk, like "ma ma ma ma!". 4) Speech errors made by kids with Apraxia can be inconsistent. They might make errors with the beginning sound of a word, followed by the wrong vowel, followed by the correct sounds, but then followed by missing an entire syllable! These challenges are can very frustrating for children with Apraxia. > Do any of these signs and symptoms sound like your child with a speech delay? Feel free to contact us! We have a number of clinicians who work with children with Apraxia of speech, and we're happy to answer any questions you may have. Tomorrow, we're going to talk a bit more about SLPs assess and diagnose Apraxia of speech. > #betterspeechandhearingmonth #apraxiaofspeech #apraxiaawareness See more

May 14th, 2020 is Regina's first official Apraxia Awarness Day! This day is recognized in cities across the world, and we're so pleased that our city has approved our request to officially celebrate these kids and their families! Thank you to City of Regina | Municipal Government! Have you ever heard of Apraxia? Most people have not! Apraxia means that an individual has difficulty sequencing short basic movements (like a speech sound ) together into sequences. Speech-Langua...ge Pathologists often treat Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS). Children with CAS have a hard time sequencing sounds together into speech. This results in speech that is very difficult for others to understand. Children with CAS usually have great language skills. They have lots of ideas, but cannot express them clearly! Children with CAS usually do a LOT of frequent therapy to make improvements to their speech sounds. They, and their families are CHAMPS in the eyes of SLPs. They work so hard, and they deserve recognition and understanding! Please SHARE! We want as many people as possible to be aware of what "Apraxia" means! Also, follow our page because we will share even more information and resources about Apraxia!

Collect a bunch of objects from around your house. Be sure to include items that can contain other items, such as boxes or bags. Vary the sizes - you want items that are big and tall, teeny and small. Try to collect 12-20 items. Take turns building your SPACE MOUNTAIN by telling each other where to place the items in relation to each other. E.g. "Put the laundry basket over the shoe. Now, put the blanket around the laundry basket. Put the book beside the basket. Put the box ...under the book." Repeat this until you’ve used all your objects (or until your space mountain is just how you want it!) Once your SPACE MOUNTAIN is complete, you can talk about what your mountain looks like. Some mountains end up being tall and skinny, and other mountains are short and wide. Did you somehow end up building more than one mountain, that is, TWO MOUNTAINS?! Does it even look like a mountain or does it look like something else? A house, maybe? Or a giraffe? Take a picture of your unique mountain and tag us on social media!

Rhyming is an important pre-literacy skill. It helps children learn how to identify and manipulate the sounds within words. Songs and nursery rhymes are a great way to practice rhyming skills! One of our favourites goes like this: Down by the bay... Where the watermelons grow Back to my home I dare not go For if I do My mother would say Have you ever seen a... Dog sitting on a log? Bear braiding his hair? Parrot eating a carrot? Down by the bay! See more