One way to work with your child's speech therapy is to offer oral motor exercises to practice the way that your child moves her mouth while saying certain words and sounds. Some of these exercises work best with certain tools and toys that you can create yourself or purchase to help expedite your child's progress. Here are some ideas for speech therapy tools for children.
Games
Games are a great tool for teaching children about speaking properly and working on their pronunciation and stuttering. You can play games such as the old children's game where you say that you are going on a picnic, and then offer to bring something in alphabetical order, such as "I'm going on a picnic, and I'm bringing an apple." Then the child repeats it, adding something else on in alphabetical order, like "I'm going on a picnic and I'm bringing an apple and butter." And so on.
Tongue twisters are also a fun way to practice speech therapy. Try some of the classics, like "She sells seashells by the sea shore." And really focus on pronouncing each word properly. After the child is comfortable doing it slowly, you can have him speed up the sentence.
Toys
Toys are another great tool for children's speech therapy. Often children dread speech therapy, but with the addition of toys, they may just forget that they are in therapy and begin playing and talking so that you can better evaluate their skills. No need for special speech therapy toys; some simple ones like a Mr. Potato Head are acceptable if you have the child name each feature that she is adding to the head.
You might also create your own toys by laminating different words and placing magnets on the back, and sticking them onto a blackboard. The child can then rearrange all of the words to create new silly sentences, all the while working on his speech and sentence structure.
Oral Exercises
You can use everyday items from around your home as tools to complete oral exercises, which are important to stretch and form the mouth before therapy. You can try oral exercises by using tools like bubbles, so that the child can exercise her mouth by blowing bubbles. Using a straw to suck up a milkshake, or even chewing bubblegum and blowing bubbles, are fun tools for working on oral therapy, which makes children more apt to participate.
