Senior Speech & Language Therapist at Sensational Kids, Sarah Gorman provides some speech & language therapy tips:
Attention Tips: 
- Keep activities brief or structure them into short blocks
- Allow for regular breaks
- Alternate between challenging and less challenging activities
- Present one activity or idea at a time
- Keep distractions to a minimum
- Increase goals gradually
- Ensure that tasks are meaningful and are within your child’srange of ability
Receptive Language Tips:
- Use simple and concise language
- Use pauses when speaking and go slow
- Support language with gestures and visual cues
- Give instructions as they are expected to happen
- Allow for processing time – try not to repeat a sentence/instruction immediately
- Turn questions into sentence starters where possible e.g. ‘The wolf lived in the…?’
- Use strong/animated facial expressions to match language and model feelings
Expressive Language Tips:
- Give your child your full attention when they want to speak
- Use simple language to comment on activities while playing withyour child
- Be patient and let them know that you will wait for them to get the message across
- Listen and show interest by maintaining eye contact and using your child’s name
- Expand your child’s comments – complete an utterance by adding in missing words
- Add more information to what your child says
- Confirm you have understood by paraphrasing, enabling your child to continue
- Model the correct use of languagefor your child
Social Communication Tips:
- Use visuals to reinforce good social communication skills, e.g. turn-taking
- Explain why a particular behaviour is not appropriate using simple language
- Simplify your language and explain any language that may have a hidden meaning
- Establish social communication ‘rules’ and use visual reminders
- Model good social communication, e.g. appropriate eye contact
Tips for Speech Sound Difficulties:
- Repeat what your child says with a correct speech model
- Try not to make your child repeat the words as drawing too much attention to mispronunciations is not always helpful
- Ask questions around what your child is trying to say to gain more information
- Repeat back the sentence to the point where you got lost to let your child know that they have been partially understood, encouraging them to tell you more
- Encourage your child to tell you another way or show you
- Communicate with your child face to face
To make an appointment with Sarah Groman for Speech & Language Therapy at Sensational Kids phone 045 520900 or email info@sensationalkids.ie