Ming from Agents of Speech teaches how to get speech-delayed kids to copy you. Start with gestures and big movements like tapping or touching shoulders, use physical prompts to make sure they succeed every time, then praise them clearly. Move to face and mouth movements only after they're ready.
Hey, what's up? This is ming here from agentsofspeech.com, i'm a speech therapist, and today we're going to talk about teaching imitation because it's very, very important. Okay? The first note is that if you're trying to get your child to imitate your sounds and words, make sure that you can teach them. You can get them to imitate your actions. Because sounds and words are harder than just actions and gestures. All right? Make sure they can do gestures before you do sounds. So when you're doing these gestures and actions, make sure that you do not do verbal instructions, okay? Do not say, touch your head. Do not say, like, touch your nose, because that's a verbal instruction. We are doing imitation. So your command should be, hey, do this. Follow me. Can you copy this? Something like that. Make it natural. Just say these kind of commands so that they understand that it's imitation. All right? Because the longer you say, it doesn't matter. All they have to do is look at you and do the same as you. So might as well make it as correct as possible. And you also remember to give a lot of praises, right? Because if you don't give praises, they don't know if they did it right or wrong. I've got a parent under our coaching, and a lot of times she forgets to praise to say that, oh, this is right, this is wrong. Oh, yeah, that's right. Nice copying, right? Did you say, oh, awesome, good job like that? Or did you tell them, hey, you didn't do it? Let's try again. These kind of feedback and praises, you have to have it, all, right? Even if your child doesn't understand you, that tone will tell them whether they did it or not and therefore get what they want in the end, right? Okay. Second point is that you should physically prompt as soon as possible. Because imitation is so important. Why we started with actions and gestures is because we cannot put our hand inside a child's mouth and move their mouth like a puppet. If we could, then it would be much easier, but it doesn't work that way. That's why we should start off with actions and gestures, right? So action, gestures, something you can do is you can prompt them. You can physically help them 100%, finish the task, right? And then praise and give them some rewards and let them know this is what we want. That. That's why we start there, because it's easy. Okay? So in the beginning, help them finish. Help her or him finish 100%. Okay? If you say, okay, follow me. Like that touching a nose. Then you would want to do it together. Oh, follow me. And then you help them together. It shouldn't. You shouldn't leave any failure on the table. You shouldn't leave any chance that they would, like, follow you, because you know they cannot. That's why you're working on it. So give them 100% of your prompt. Make sure that they do it, they finish it. And once you keep on prompting, you can prompt less and less and less until they. They're okay and they can do it themselves. Okay. And be careful, because this is like just natural reflex. I see a lot of parents, they will say, oh, yeah, I know they can do it because they've done it before, right? They can sing and dance with a YouTube video. I just can't believe they can't imitate me. Well, it's different context. Number one. They got sounds, songs, music. And they also have a strong routine as a song. You know, inside a video, you don't have that. You're telling them to do something one off. So be careful. Do not ask questions when they can't do it. Like, oh, what are you doing? I know you can do it. Show me again. You know what? What do you do? What do you do? If you want, like, these kind of questions aren't gonna help them, it's just gonna add more noise to the situation and make it even harder for the child to understand at that point. Okay, lastly, we did talk about starting off with actions and gestures, right? The reason why is because it's easier. So start off with the easiest of those. One of the ones that I love doing is like tapping on a table, right? It's easy. There's a sound and only requires one hand, right? And it's a big movement, so you can prompt very easily, Right. It's not like. Like touching a mouth or the lips where it's hard to aim, right? So what else can you do? Like tapping the table, Touch your head, you know, touch your shoulders. These are big movements. You slowly move towards your face. Because what we're teaching here is that they're slowly looking at you and guessing what's happening, right? And they might not be very accurate at first. And very lazy, as the parents say. You know, they're lazy and doing it. Tell them to tap their shoulders. Follow me. They do like that or whatever. And they touch somewhere else. Well, they're not accurate yet. So slowly, as they get more accurate, move towards the face. Because what we want to target is the sounds and words, right? So therefore, the Next step would be to touch body parts on the face. So might be nose, mouth, whatever. Those are smaller. It requires more accuracy and requires them to look carefully, requires them to touch carefully. And then what you want to do is to try doing the mouth shapes like. Like that. This easy ones. And last, you would want to try sounds right, which is a different topic. A whole new different topic. We're gonna talk about it later on in another video. Okay? So if you guys need any help, just comment below. Just add some questions. My topics come from the questions that come into my inbox and the comment section. So make sure that you do so so that I know what to talk about. And during these times in the pandemic, if you need any help with imitation per se, you can go to agentsofspeech.com nonverbalguide where with dashes in between, I'll put it. There's something here. And you can also click the link in the description box. It gives you the three steps that I use to teach any child to start verbal imitation. All right, this is something that I've worked very hard on teaching parents how to do. I mean, it's easy for a therapist to do it, but teaching a parent to go from scratch to verbal imitation is super hard. All right, but because I've been working with a bunch of parents and we've actually recorded down how we did it and put it in that PDF for you. So go download it angelsofspeech. Com Nonverbal guide with dashes in between. Okay. Link in the description box. And that's all for this video. If you have any questions, do let me know and I'll see you in the next one real soon.
