For my clients that work on speech sound goals, I’m always brainstorming ways to promote practice outside of therapy sessions. One way to do this is by giving ‘homework’ with target words; however, worksheets week after week may become boring. To switch things up, I may suggest to parents some of the activities listed below to encourage sound production and practice outside of the therapy room in a way that’s engaging and fun for the child as well!
- Scavenger hunt: Formulate a list of items containing your target speech sound that you’d find inside the house; to make this task more challenging for older children, you can even time them to see how long it would take to collect all items
- Sensory bin: collect items that contain the child’s target speech sounds and put them inside a bin filled with beans, rice, cotton balls, etc.
- Lava: a twist on ‘the floor is lava’ — if you have items which act as the rocks in this game, place a target practice word on each, your child cannot move to the next rock until he/she has practiced the word X amount of times (refer to what the SLP has recommended in terms of frequency of practice)
- Books: Oftentimes, I have found children love this activity! As the parent or child is reading, the child identifies words or pictures within the book containing their target sound. I have found it most successful to practice the word once hw/she has finished reading the entire page.