How to Teach Children to Speak Naturally | Speech Therapist Answers Parent Questions

Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com we teach parents how to train their speech delayed child at home. Okay, so today we're going to answer some questions from our community. The first one is from Toshiba and her question is. Hi. My question would be to suggest a few exercises for a five year old that focus on opening and closing the mouth as well as placing the right emphasis on syllables. The goal is to help them speak more clearly. Any advice will be appreciated. So it's very, very difficult. First of all, give you an advice based on what you, you said to me. As a speech therapist, we really need to understand how the speech is made, right. So there's articulation and when you say that, focus on opening and closing the mouth. My guess, Toshiba, is that your child is mumbling. So whenever we're dealing with any type of speech and language issue, we always want to try to find a breakdown level. All right. Down level means is there a place where your child will actually speak clearly? Is it one word, two words, a phrase, a sentence, whatever. When you talk about, oh, suggest me a few exercises. Right? That's very difficult for me because I don't know what you think is improper when actually it might be like just something that is totally okay in terms of speech and language development. Right. So sorry, I can't give you more unless we can hear some sort of samples of your child. Okay. Of which we don't really do this, but if you can, you can try to upload in our community and if you want to ask us questions like this, you can go to www.agentsofspeech.com course. But we have free courses and a whole community of 11,000 parents right now inside of the community. So it's pretty cool. Next question. Is Nazia all right? So he, she actually, she says, hi, I need help with both my sons. One is five, the other is three years old. They both have speech delay. They are off from school for summer holiday and I want to spend some time with them and make our speech better during these holidays. Don't know how to start with the little one on toilet training as well as doesn't understand what to do on the toilet. I'm already following your tips on a video about toilet training. Okay, so there's not really a question. But you know Nazia, if you're already going through the free stuff, right? And by the way, our community has loads of free courses. So go there, use the search function, you know, like ask away inside of the community, right? Now I don't really have any type of advice to you because I already made the courses so that it covers most of the most frequently asked questions. All right, so the next question is Chidiogo. Sorry if I'm butchering your name, but anyways, she says, hi, my child. This child is 7 years old, but only hums. He hummed nursery rhymes and cartoon theme songs since he was three. He's unable to consistently form sounds only ah, how can I help him? Right. So the first thing is you have to try to get this child on a sound imitation kind of task just to know what kind of vowels are available, what kind of sounds are available. Right. So does he even try to imitate? So if he doesn't try to imitate, it's very hard for us to know his true ability. Like when we're always doing children who are like humming stuff we need to understand from a speech and language perspective. So what I just talked about was the speech perspective about knowing what again is a breakdown level. Like can we find what sounds the child can do? Like what vowels are available, what concepts are available? And that stems from can you get the child to actually imitate? Okay, and once you can, great. Then you list out and you write out all the sounds that is available and you try to build it as like building blocks and try to see if you can get this child to, to speak that are non words. That doesn't necessarily necessarily have to be a word. Okay. And on the language side, what you need to do is like you have to start thinking about should I use any sign language, should I use any like pecs, like AAC stuff to replace that speech before he catches up there. Right. So Those are my $0.02 about this situation. All right, next question is from Shanta. She says thanks for the opportunity to connect. I have a 2 year old son and yet to be diagnosed with LESD. Try some of the activities such as microcourse. However, I'm unable to make my son engage for any of them more than a minute or two. He seems to like sensory play like sand, water, clay or whatever. Can you please suggest some ideas to or some videos teaching speech through sensory play, especially while bath time? Well, I think, Shanta, like if you can't get your child to be engaged for at least a minute or two, it means that the thing that you're using is not very engaged. Right. So the, the stuff that we talk about doesn't need to only be during, like if you do it during bath time, there are too many variables going on and the micro course, the free course that we use to sell for money now, like just given to all the parents all over the world. The main thing is that it's teaching you how to do therapy. It's not teaching the child how to comply to you, it's teaching you. So the first thing, Shanta, is like, you think about the rewards that you're using. Why can't you engage him for more than a minute or two? Is he going out there and doing something else? Right. There's a video, 10 or 11, I forgot. There's the one that's troubleshooting. Watch that video and think about it. Don't go and say, oh, it's not working. Like, it's not like that. Like, just think about in reverse. Right? Let's think about what's the worst case scenario. So how do you get your child to not engage you? Thinking the total opposite. Right. Try only one time. That will make your child not not engaged. Use, like really crappy rewards. Right? That will get you really not engaged. Like, child put rewards, toys, and everything all over the house for free access. That will make your child not want to want to engage with you. Right. Make sure that you keep on quizzing your child to say and talk and make them look at you and stuff. Right. That also will turn off children. So do the opposite of those which we discussed in the micro course. Watch the troubleshooting video and don't go ahead and think, oh, he seems to like sensory play. There's no seams or not. A reward is very simple. What does he snatch? Right. That's your reward. Okay. Anyway, Shanta, like a good question. And just go through the micro course again and think about what you're doing wrong. Okay. All right. Darina says, my child just started using longer sentences and I would like to start introducing a second language. How would you suggest I do that? Should I say in English and then repeat it again in a new language? Should I talk in a new language part of the day? As a single parent, I cannot divide the languages between parents. That's fine, Darina. I think whichever way that you usually do it would be fine. Just as long as you're not mixing like both languages in one sentence. Right? So you can do one sentence and then you say again in your mother tongue. That would make a lot of sense. And you can totally just speak in a new language. The new language during, you know, a part of the day. That's also good. But what I would suggest is that you speak at your child's language level, which you know, already are starting to use longer sentences already now. So just at that level that your child is comfortable at. And then start speaking the new language as a translation every time you say a sentence. All right, anyways, good question. Barbara says, my son is seven years old. He has a problem with pronouncing letters. P, B, M. I noticed that these are all the letters you start to pronounce while your mouth is closed. That. Yep. Those are called bilabials, by the way. You can get him to sound out the letter individually just fine, but when you try to get him to say a word of any letters in it, it falls apart. Replaces B with a D, M and a M with an NP with a T. Well, so this is very, very consistent. There's a rule to it. This is most probably phonological. All right, so there's a difference between phonological, phonology, like phonological disorders, and articulation disorders. So the difference is that, you know, articulation, they don't know the place. So if it's something that is stimulable, meaning, like, you can get them like. Barbara is very smart here. Probably went through our speech disorder crash course. She knows that the breakdown level for the pbm, the bilabial sounds, are at the phoneme level, meaning, like, at isolation level only. Like. Right, these ones. But when, like adding any of the letters to it, maybe like a vowel, like pa, ba, mah, these ones, it will immediately go from a B to a D. And this is what we call backing. Because the front of the mouth goes back a little bit is the alveolar ridge, which is where the D and the N and the T. These are all the sounds that produces it. But look, I'm just talking about all the theory here. So what do you do? Right. So first of all, you have to anchor and choose one P, B, or M. Usually M is the easiest. Why? Because it's a continuous sound and it uses the resonance in the nose. Right. So it's a very strong sound. Whereas a P and a B could work as well. It really depends on which child, how your child is. Like, which one is easier for a child. You just have to check it. So there are different ways to anchor that sound with cues and prompts. So cues and prompts are the most. I would say is literally the most. The biggest reason why you would see a therapist is because you. You find cues and prompts that will help someone to learn some sort of a speech and language ability. Right. So you could use a. You know, those wooden sticks that we call temple depressors. Or like a lollipop stick. Put it here and go like that a few times to establish the cue with the M. Right? And afterwards, what you want to do is, like, just by putting the lollipop stick here, your child will already say the M sound. And now all you got to do is to add the vowel. You go like that. It's all about cues and prompts. So watch the cues and prompts inside of the speech disorder crash course that we have on the community. Right? Check that out. And then what you want to do is to think about. Okay, so this prop works. So you have to stick on to it until he can add a vowel at the back of the M, which is what we call CV level. A consonant plus a vowel. Okay, so that's what I would do. I would try using a Deloitte pop stick. Or I could just use my fingers, which is like this, like that. So just like two fingers making the lips together and then one. One thumb on the top to indicate that it's a nasal sound. It doesn't really matter how you do it as long as it's consistent and your child knows what it is about. So the biggest problem right now, Barbara, is that in between just telling him to say ma, there's an obvious breakdown level and that your child's performance has broken down, and therefore you need him. You need a cue and a prompt to go in the middle to help him as a bridging step. All right, anyways, let's keep going. So Lisa says, my daughter is six. She communicates her wants and needs in two, three to four word phrases pretty well. Our biggest struggle is answering questions. If I ask her a question, the answer is no, she will respond with a no with no problem. But if I ask a question where the answer is yes, she repeats it. For example, if I say, do you want to the playground? She will respond, go to the playground. Really struggling with how to get her to actual questions in her own words and building descriptive sentences. I worry about sending her to kindergarten this year because she won't be able to tell me about her day in more words. Please help. So, Lisa, there's functionally no problem about how she's communicating with you right now, and she gets the job done, right? That's why she's not gonna go out of her way to, like, tell you a yes or, like, yeah, I would like to go to the playground, whatever. So instead, what you want to do is, like. Because she's echoing, right? And a no is so Easy to learn. So what you want to do is like immediately give her the answer as the echo. So do you want to go to the playground? Well, if you know that she does want and she doesn't say no, you can say yes, please, right? Yes, I want to go to the playground, whichever. And so that's the first way to do it. And I think that's a good way as well. The second thing is you have to understand that she communicates her needs and wants in a three to four word phrase. That's most probably a lot of frozen phrases, right? What we call like, you know, I want this, let's go, whatever. This is something, right? So we need more descriptive language. And this comes from like just general play and doing a Melio type of training. There's outline and word combiners. That's also free on the community. All right, so what you gotta do is like when the language behavior comes out and you want to think about what to do, you model the answer you want to hear. Right. Immediately after. The second thing is you want to upgrade her language base level so that she doesn't just communicate with her needs and wants. She also talks to you when she's playing to comment on stuff and so on. All right, so Rupali says, my son is 4 and A and a half years old and I'm mild autism and hyperactive. Hyperact and hyperactive, sorry. He talks only two to three times a day with limited words and only with his loved ones. How can I make him speak with everyone? And every time you're asking for something that's too much, you know, like I don't know how to answer this. You're going from zero all the way up here on a mountain, right? I can't. You know, the only answer is play as much as you can with him. Right. Develop more different ways that are like rewarding for him to communicate and then slowly add people into his life. Teach him games, teach him like ways to play and add people into it. There's no shortcut, like you're asking a thousand steps ahead. It's, you know, like go through the courses. You didn't tell me during that two to three times a day with limited words. How limited is it? Is it right? So you have to do two things. You have to teach more play and you have to upgrade his language level. So I would say that you gotta go through the courses, especially the word combiners. 1. All right, so anyways, Sardini says my four and a half year old kid speaks in sentences and does a Lot of self talk describing what happens around him. Yet the sentences are still robotic manner and intonation is still in the standard manner. Don't know what that means. How do I get that natural flow of speech. Also he struggles in yes, no answers. I get it's right for his needs, but not. But for information. Like, is this a cat? Or is this the way you use this tool? He's not available. He's not able to achieve the right response of yes and no. So, okay, the thing is, if you're talking about teaching like a cadence, like a rhythm in speech, right? There really isn't really the. I've said really two times. But what I'm trying to get at is that there isn't a way to teach this. All right, because intonation can be like because of two things, right? Because of, you know, a person who is on the spectrum don't understand that there are different ways of saying the same thing, right? So intonation is a huge social thingy that we have to teach. Right. The other side is that they're incapable physically to do the intonations. So what I would say is, like, start off with teaching how to ask a question as a way to teach the intonation. And you have to find something that he really wants. So for example, if he wants, really wants to watch the tv, you have to teach him where is the remote? With gestures telling him that at the end he has to go up in the tone and you teach him just this one thing first, just so that he knows he can change his tone. And later on he will know, oh, when I'm imitating someone, I have to imitate the tone too. And that's a good starting point. The second question about like the yes or no questions, right? I would say it's more of a, you know, if you say, oh, he can do for his needs, but information says this is a cat or is this how to use or whatever. I just think that it's more of a. He isn't incentivized to answer that question. Why would he care to answer is this a cat or not? It's just that you're trying to quiz it, right? So if he can answer yes or no for his needs, do you want this? Do you want whatever? Yes and no. Then obviously he does understand yes and no questions, but he just isn't incentivized. So I would say like add a reward and make sure that during your teaching time, it's very structured so that you have for your child to know. Oh, when I answer questions Nicely, I get rewarded, right? So at this point in time, that's all I can say with the amount of information given. Okay, next question. ORFA says my twins are nine years old on the autism spectrum, both with a speech delay. They speak. They still talk. Only two to four word phrases. Example, want milk. Want paper. I am sad. Okay, Those aren't really like true phrases. They are frozen, okay, like want. It's just a placeholder. Okay? They will not have a full conversation. They currently have speech and aba. Both can read and write. What else can I do to help them start getting with articulation? All right, so I'm not sure if you're talking about articulation or language here, because whatever you just described is, is basically language related and nothing to do with articulation. So articulation is the ability to say the speech sounds correctly, right? So I would say what you're talking about is stuck on a need based communication. So what you need to do is to teach as much play as possible. Make communication fun. So get rid of all your language goals and start just playing with them, right? And teach them new ways to play with stuff. And you can just take a look at the word combiners. There's a whole section about that. All right, Natalie C. Says, how about a video about sensory processing disorder and its impact on speech and language development? Also oral motor planning disorder. Look, Natalie, first of all, I need to know why you want to know this information, right? You can go ahead and read a textbook about sensory processing disorder, but maybe like 5% would actually apply to your child, right? So if you say speech and language development. Dude. Sensory processing disorder, of course is going to impact speech and language development. Because if someone's sensory is like dysregulated, I'm just going to tell you, if you ever went to a, to a dentist, right, and you had those like painkillers injected in your mouth, you can't even talk or eat properly because your sensory is all over the place. So therefore, when you have a child who is sensory processing disorder, right? I'm not saying that the sensory is going to be numbed out like that, but the sensory profile is going to be different. And therefore when you're trying to teach speech, it's going to be harder. So maybe like it really depends on the child because when you talk about speech, it's different from language because language is step by step. Well, you have language disordered children, but at the same time, as long as you have the correct context, which is play, most of the time, it's easy to teach language, but for speech, it needs to be very specific about the child. Right? I can talk about oral motor planning disorder for a whole hour, but at the end of the day, is it going to apply to your child? So, Natalie, it's not about, like, oh, I want to learn 100% about the oral motor planning, right? I to learn a hundred percent about, like, sensory processing disorder. Because at the end of the day, we're serving parents and not professionals. So if you're a professional, you know, go open a textbook. That's how we all learn. Right? But if you're a parent, this kind of information is totally unhelpful for you because, like, you can learn about apraxia of speech and then you drill down into, like, differentiated, like, diagnosis, right? Between, oh, sometimes it's not oral motor planning, sometimes it's, you know, coordination and sometimes the strength issues like the star tree and so on. But at the end of the day, how does that help you as a parent? Right? If you ask these, like, really big questions as like, oh, how does sensory processing disorder impact speech? Of course the impacts differently, right? Like you're asking, how does autism spectrum affect impact someone's life? We're not giving a TED talk here. It needs to be very, very specific about your child's needs. All right? Anyways, end of rant. I'm not answering this because it's going to be like two hours and I'm not even a specialist in this. You know, if you really want to go for it, just YouTube this or like, listen to some professors online. I've got some therapists ask me some questions over the Internet and they get angry because I don't answer them right. I only have like 10, 11 years experience. You ask me this kind of questions. There are loads of people online in universities. If you send them a cold email that work in universities, they have like 20, 30 years of clinical experience who put their whole life into actually teaching others about sensory processing disorder. Well, ask those people, not me. Because in agents of speech, my job is to teach parents what to do. Practical tips. One, two, three ABCs. Right? That's my job. Anyways, next. Next question. And the last question. Hannah says our four and a half year old diagnosed with developmental delay, can now speak short sentences, but still repeats what he says multiple times when he doesn't understand what we're saying or asking. He does this when he's nervous, frustrated, scared. We tried rephrasing our question comments or just changing the topic completely to stop him from repeating so much. Unfortunately, Only works a small percentage of the time. What can we do? Okay, so this is a good question. I think when he doesn't understand something, the best way is to dumb it down, right? And you've said, oh I'm, I'm gonna rephrase the question or the comments or change the complic. Like we don't try to rephrase it and change the topic because if a child is already anxious that they know they're doing a bad job, right. What we need to do is to go down the queuing and the prompting again, right? So can we give them a simpler question? Right? Can we give them choices? Can we guess what, what they want to say and just tell them to model what we want to want him to say? Right. So these are the, the tools that we use in therapy. So for give you an example. So one of them is a child who keeps on pretending to, to call on the phone and goes like that. So the mom that she's going to start asking her a question, what do you say on the phone? And then she just keeps on what do you say on the phone? Blah, blah, blah blah. Like so it becomes it's a similar situation but not a hundred percent correct. So what you should do in this situation is to lean on his, his ability to actually, to actually copy and eating a lot of the things. So here instead of trying to extract more things from the child, you should give language a hundred percent and don't care if they, they get what she should be talking about, right? So what do you say on the phone? First you say hi and then you ask how you're doing and then you get to do whatever and then you just immediately tell the child what to say. So a lot of times for children who are always repeating a lot, it's best to just lean on their repetition because if you give them choices, if they repeat the choice, then the choice cue the prompt is useless. Your rephrase which is still a question, then your question is still useless. So the best way is to give them what language they're supposed to say and just keep it at that. Okay, so that's all for this video. Thank you for all the questions that we got. And if you want to ask questions like, like this format, let, let us know in the comments. If you do want to ask us this, it's only for parent inside of our community. Go to ww.agents of speech.com course go there, sign up on that email. You get a link to our, our private community. We don't want or, like, just easily accessed because there's a lot of private information inside, and that's why we're trying 11,000 people inside. So that's pretty cool. I look forward to seeing you in the next video. See you next time. Bye. Bye.