By: Melissa Friend, M.A., CCC-SLP
Are you looking for easy and fun ways to practice articulation at home? Articulation therapy is really teaching new motor patterns for your mouth. To establish a new motor pattern, you need daily practice! Spending 5-10 minutes every day practicing those motor patterns can significantly increase progress in therapy. Here are some ideas to work on your child’s speech skills on the days between speech therapy sessions.
- Charades – take turns acting out target words and guessing what the word is, using correct articulation to say the word
- I Spy – play I Spy, but use target words instead of colors
- Use a turn-taking game – say one word to get one piece or turn of the game
- Stack cups – build a tower of cups with target words on them, see how many you can say/stack before it falls down
- Tape target words to the wall, turn off the lights and use a flashlight to find them
- Take turns being the teacher
- Alphabet car game – instead of looking for each letter of the alphabet, search for things with the target sound
- Hopscotch game with sidewalk chalk – write words in each square
- Playdoh – shape the word in playdoh
- Paper ball basketball – write each word on a piece of paper, say word, crumple, and toss into the hoop
- Scavenger hunt – go on a walk, or hunt around the house for objects with the target sound
- Picture collage – cut out pictures from magazines of things with the target sound
- Around the house – think of 2 objects containing the target sound that are kept in each room of the house and say the word 5 times
- Categories – pick a category and name as many items in that category as you can that contain the target sound
- Crafts – make a craft (ex: bead necklace, thumbprint painting, cotton ball art, etc.) and for each piece say one target word