10 Top Speech Therapy Tips for Children with Down Syndrome

The following list of SALT ideas for young children with Down syndrome might help you and your child develop their oral motor skills.

A few of the speech therapy tools for children with Down syndrome

Every child is a unique individual.  Each one develops at their own pace, responds well to their favourite toys and has their own strengths and areas that need support. This is no less true for children with Down's Syndrome, so trust your instincts.

Fun with Speech Therapy

Most children with Down's Syndrome need SALT sessions to help them communicate more easily and speak more clearly. This can focus on the use of signing/Makaton, jaw position exercises and using certain types of cups, toys etc, or it can be about having fun with sounds and using visual ways to break down words.

I was a language teacher in a previous life, well, in my life before becoming a Mum. I used to teach English as a Foreign Language and that very often entailed helping students to produce quite tricky sounds in a fun and relaxed, even silly way.                                


I decided to take the same approach with Natty. She's been having trouble with ____sp words, such as crisp. They tended to come out as ____ps, or crips.

So, we took each syllable as a unit and reeeeeally exaggerated it, pulling funny faces and giggling as we went.

crisssssssssP

The P sound is what is called an unvoiced plosive, which basically means that lots of air shoots out of your mouth when you say it.
So, you can have masses of fun practising moving paper in front of your mouth, or, as we demonstrate here, blowing someone's hair around.

Watch Natty and I work on the word wasssssssssP at story time.


                                

Learning to Read (and a 7 yr old Camera Woman)

My motivations for rushing to post this hastily hand-crafted video were three quotes from people close to me in the last 24 hours...

My husband, "Children with special needs don't achieve extraordinary things without extraordinary levels of input, encouragement and commitment." (That's true, but the same can be said of all children.  I wanted to show how simple and fun you can make developmental exercises at home.)

A Speech and Language Therapist friend whom I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting, "For me it's all about helping people hear the important message about making the most of exploring a variety of activities, creating different materials that you child will like and celebrating every tiny communication moment.  It's about having your eyes fixed on the end goal - confident competent communicators who resourceful use everything and everyone to shout to the world around them." (She's right, and boy, can Natty shout to the world around her!)

Our birth companion, "Through your blog you are changing ingrained belief systems by being so soft, so real and so honest,  by showing such invisible vulnerability, that it becomes irresistible."  (That one brought tears to my eyes.)

So here we have a snippet of the kind of activities we do on a weekly basis at home.  You can plainly see that they are working.  I have much more exciting ones up my sleeve, but I had run out of post-it notes and glitter, and my camera woman was only 7 years old! (Didn't she do a great job!)

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For those interested in the nitty gritty:

We are using 2 Jolly Phonics friezes, cut up and laminated (copyright would not allow you to photocopy them).  We accompany each sound with its action. Note Natty starts singing the "C,C, clicking castenets' song that accompanies the 'C' sound.

We then use a Jolly Phonics set of sound cards.  You could make your own. We drop the actions as the sounds are learnt.

Ask your child to identify words and sounds before you move on to asking them to produce them. ("Find...", before"what does this say?")

Note I ask her to find an 'S' which did not exist. She remained unfazed.

Then move on to whole words.  Label items, accompany with pictures, always try to use in context.  Children with Down's Syndrome are visual learners, but I think Natty is also a kinaesthetic learner - actions, texture, movement, song and movement help too.

And finally you are ready for simple reading schemes.  Pre-teach the words before you start a book.  Present the words in as many formats as you can.  Create your own silly sentences.  Point out the same words in other texts or on posters etc. Note the way Natty self-corrects when she makes a mistake.  Allow time for this.

And most importantly...DON'T GIVE UP xxx