Speech Therapy for 2 Year Old at Home | Tips From a Speech Therapist

Hey, what's up? This is Ming here, a speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com today in this little video, we're going to talk about speech therapy for 2 year olds. And this age group, 2 year olds, they are actually a bunch of kids who have very low attention span. They're running around, they're constantly exploring stuff. So when you are, and if you have been to a speech therapy clinic when Your child is 2 year olds, you will see that they are always on the floor. The speech therapist or the therapist or the teacher is on the floor trying to engage them with different toys and stuff. Um, and by the looks of it, it's, it looks like that, you know, no one's doing any teaching and that's because you cannot sit them down for a very long time. Their muscles aren't built up to sit for extended period of time and they would much rather to crawl and touch stuff and roll around and stuff. So it's better that we follow them. And when we're teaching children of 2 year old, right, we're actually focusing on a few things. Number one is to keep up or maintain or create communication intention. What I mean by that is we want them to want to talk to us, right? We want the child to actually want to come up and communicate, therefore learn some language. Okay? It doesn't matter if it's a sound, if it's a gesture, if it's tapping, if it's eye contact, doesn't matter. As long as you're creating that you're, you have an interaction. Okay? Number two is build routines. You have to build routines so that they know how to operate in the world. Okay? All, nearly all things are routines. Even communicating can be a routine if one might argue. So I take a turn of saying something and then you say something, I listen again. It's a routine. Everyone understands that. And when you can like when a child knows how to like build routines and maintain it and acquire routines, then, then it's much easier for them to acquire play skills because basically playing a toy can be very repetitive. It's a routine. You do something over and over again. The last thing that we try to teach two year olds is actually not targeted at the children, it's target at parents like yourself. We tell parents to follow the child's lead, okay? Because when we follow a child's lead at this age, we kind of know what they can do, what they cannot do, how they are already expressing their needs and wants. And then we can go in and teach them the correct language stuff. Okay. So we're going to talk more about it later on in the video, so don't worry. Okay. If your child is having some speech problems, meaning they have. They're mispronouncing a lot of sounds. They are. Nobody really understands what they're saying. Well, at two year old you cannot do much. All right? There's no, I mean, it's difficult to put them on a chair and then drill them on certain speech sounds because speech sounds is like a habit. You need to keep on telling them, oh, please do the F sound. Keep on doing it. They have to build the good habit of using those sounds. So now is not a good time of training it. So what do you do? You can auditory bombard a child as they. As we call it a speech therapist. What that means is that we just keep on emphasizing it. Okay, let's say that, you know, if you're a non English speaker and you have problem with the sound th, like, right? So what I'm going to do is every time I encounter a word with a th, right? If I were to say like thesaurus or something like that, I would go, yeah, thesaurus, every time. To a non native English speaker, it will be easier for them to pick up. Oh, so there's a th in the thesaurus. And that's what we call building phonological awareness, meaning the knowledge about the sounds. If I don't emphasize it, it's very easy for someone to just think that it's actually the sound of F. Like the service. Like every time when you emphasize something, it helps them build that knowledge towards the sound. All right? And the last thing I want to talk about speech is please see a speech therapist at this point, okay. There's no other kind of alternative I can suggest to you. And to be honest, it's difficult for a two year old to start speech goals. So you can actually hold off a little longer until they hit three. I think that's my personal opinion. I. I think it's easier to assess speech sounds then because then you can sit them down and make them look at pictures and then they can imitate sounds. And it's much easier to have a full picture about what they can and cannot do about their speech. The next thing I want to talk about is communication temptation. That's how you get the intention to come way up and then you can teach them some language. And what I mean by tempt is to like show them something that they want. Maybe it's the phone, right? Maybe they, oh, look, phone. And then they might come to you. And when they come, and when they come to you, you can tempt them to communicate, okay? Meaning they want something from you, you teach them how to get it. When they try to grab it or something, you might teach that it's a tap or maybe they need to, like, kiss you. I don't know. It really depends on what you're trying to achieve, right here. One of the most common things that speech therapists do, and I cannot tell for any, everyone, but for me, it's like I like to teach gestures. So if I'm trying to use a phone, which is not very natural, by the way, use a toy, okay? Or a ball or something. When they want something from you, make it into an open palm gesture or a pointing gesture just so that they know that they don't need a snatch from you, that you will provide for them as long as they do the correct and appropriate signaling, like language to ask for something, okay? So it doesn't need to be a gesture. If your child is already using sounds and imitating, just use a sound. The phone might be like, just like, oh, oh, oh. If they're elementary, you know, or if they're really good, just go for the whole word phone. The thing is, I don't really like it when parents target or anyone to target like I want. I feel like that is a missed opportunity to teach vocabs. So every. Don't use like I want for all things, or else it's going to be difficult for a child to understand that these are individual items. And, you know, I want is like a wild card for getting everything. That isn't the best way to teach. To teach language per se. All right? The next thing is building a routine. So routine can be anything, okay? But it must be fun, or else why would anyone do it? First of all, if it can be as simple as pushing a car, rolling a ball, right? As long as it's fun, it's engaging, and it's rewarding, then that routine will stick. For example, do you have a routine for fitness training? If it's not rewarding for you, you really hate it, you're not going to stick to it. So think about in that way, okay? This is something you can do that you must can do over and over and over again. Remember, to acquire a new skill and language or language per se, you must repeat over and over and over again until you get it right. So therefore, if a routine, you can keep on repeating it, then there are more chances for you to actually teach. And it doesn't need to be limited to toys. You can do like jumping together on a trampoline or on the bed. If you don't like that, don't do it. Okay. Or, you know, you can do like swinging the hands, right? You can put them on a swing. Okay. You can put them on a slide. These are all routines that you can try. And then once you can anticipate what happens next, meaning you're on the swing and then they're like rocking the body, trying to go forward, then you know, you can teach language because then you can teach them to, oh, maybe do a gesture, a sound, whatever, like communication, temptation, right? Basically it's that. But you build, build a routine and then you tempt them. That's going to make a whole load of sense because there's a context. Now. Last thing I want to talk about is following your child's lead, which is a language facilitation technique. There's loads of these techniques over on the Internet. There's a book called It Takes Two to Talk. I'll link some resources down in the description below. You can check it out. But first of all, I want to tell you that if it's a two year old, then you should assess what kind of toys he or she likes. You know, put all the toys on the floor, see which one that he or she takes. Okay. Let them choose it. Don't choose it for them because you know, you really don't know what their preferences are. And at this moment in time, they're not like they don't understand the world good enough to allow you to introduce stuff into their lives. So just let them choose it. Number two is like, allow them to show you how they play. How do they play with it? Do they bang it? Do they whatever. And then you will see. Oh, okay. So my, my child doesn't have the play skills to actually roll a car. My child doesn't really have a play skill to scoop with a toy spoon and then give it to a doll. So a lot of times I see children use a spoon and they start whacking it on something like a drum. So therefore it tells you more if you let them lead you. And then you will see. Oh, so here I can try to teach them the appropriate way to use this toy and then build their play skills. And when the play skill becomes a routine yet again, you can do some temptation and teach some language. Right? Because they can anticipate what happens next. Before you do all that language training, you, you should copy them. Because if you copy them, it makes them understand that you're acknowledging what they're doing and how they play. And you become a playmate because you're pretending to what they're doing. You might be whacking on the bowl with, with a spoon. And when you're doing it together, it's fun for them, it means that, oh, we're on the same wavelength, right? So before you jump in and try to teach and correct their play, join in, observe, wait, and then copy what they do. Okay, so the main point for two year olds and speech therapy, if you can do, if you can do it, is to create communication, intention, meaning they want to communicate with us. They build routines that are fun, that sticks, and you keep on doing it. Before we leave, you can go to agents of speech.com checklist for a bunch of tools and toys that we recommend to parents like yourself if you want to start home therapy today. Okay, thank you for, for tuning in today. If you have any questions and comments, you can put them in the comment section below and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.