I’m working with this little cutie right now who just can not seem to put the final sounds on his words to save his life. I just started working with him though, so I’m sure that we will make great progress together. After explaining to his mother the difference between an articulation disorder and phonological disorder, she asked me what the next step would be and how they could work on things at home if we weren’t working on just one specific sound. While I do think it can be a bit trickier to practice targeting phonological processes (vs. straight artic) at home, I think it’s very do-able and getting the parent(s) involved can be really helpful. For this particular case, mom is in the therapy room with us, so that helps a lot. Since final consonant deletion is impacting his speech the most, that’s where we decided to start.
In our first session, I started by making sure that he understood the concept, “the end”. We looked at pictures of animals that were in a line and he had to point to the one that was at the end of the line. The reason I do this is because a few years ago, I was referring to “the end sound” and it became very apparent that the little girl I was working with had no idea what that meant. So, we had to back up, introduce the concept “the end” and move forward from there. I think it’s really establish that your youngster gets it first, then you move ahead to talk about sounds.
My favorite thing to do with FCD kiddos is to make an “end sound button”. We push that button each time we put one of our sounds on the end. If they forget to produce that final consonant, I just remind them to “press the end sound button”. Usually, that’s enough to get that final sound out there. If not, then I model the word with and without the final sound and might ask for a thumbs up/thumbs down to make sure they hear the difference.
We usually touch the picture or object we are naming, and then press the end sound button. For “dog”, it would sound something like, “daw” (while touching picture of dog), “guh” (while touching end sound button). I find that it works really well and really helps for those kids that can’t repeat words with the final consonant when given verbal models alone. The visual cue just really seems to help them out. I created a freebie on TpT in case you’d like a template of your own. The design is different than what is pictured above, but it’s the same idea. Give it a try and let me know how it works!
Do you have any tips or tricks that you like to use with your FCD kiddos?
Recent Comments