Speech Therapy for 3 Year Old at Home | Tips From a Speech Therapist

Hey, what's up? This is ming here from agentsofspeech.com I'm a speech therapist and today I want to talk about speech therapy for three years old. Three year olds, generally they should be exploring more toys, learning more play skills, and then at times there will be some structured tasks. I think 3 year olds should really spend 50% of the time on the, on the chair, on the table, doing some tests. And then 50% of other times just like playing with you, maybe on the floor, maybe on the table. It doesn't matter. Okay. But I really think that at this point in time, they should play a lot more and learn by playing and then the language will come to facilitate that. Okay, Ming, what do I play? All right, here are some suggestions. Number one, a cook set. So any imaginary play that uses like a stove, knives, toy food, like, like a tap, like a washing tap, thing, like a blender, these kind of things work because they've seen you, they've seen you use it before, so it makes sense for them. Okay. Another thing is like a doctor's kit. You can pretend to be a patient, he can be. Pretend to be doctor. You can set up a routine. The list of toys, the tools, the list of tools. You can lay them out and have them do it one by one. You can do any other kit, okay. You can do like construction kits as long as they're pretending to be a certain profession or something. Okay. Other things you can do is like things that are around the house. It might be that you have a washing machine set, okay, that you can put inside. They wash some clothes and then put it online or something. You might have an iron to iron it, like a toy iron. And then something that you can also try is like a dollhouse. Okay? You've seen it everywhere. Basically everyone likes to use dollhouses. And that's because it's highly imaginative and it's very like this. It's miniature and you can do a lot of stuff with it. Another thing that you can do is with car parks. You might not be able to target as much language with car parks, but you know, boys love it, okay? So you can use it as a reward or you can teach them some easy words like up and down. You know, park here, park there, upstairs, downstairs. These you can also target. Okay. Another of my favorite is the vending machine. Actually, I made a whole video on vending machine. So you can put, you can look underneath in the description box to find that video. And then you can target some very easy board games, a lot ones that I like is something called single, you can find it. And another one is called match it or smatch for that matter. Okay, so these are the toys that I do recommend for 3 year old in general. If you want full checklist, you can go to agents of speech.com checklist. It's a bunch of tools and toys that I recommend to parents like yourself. So with these toys, what do you do? You do a lot of pretend play as I was talking about. Pretend play, Pretending to be someone else. A patient, a doctor, a cook, someone from the, from a restaurant, a waiter per se. Pretend to be you, the mom, like washing clothes or the helper or the dad. It depends what they're pretending. As long as they have some sort of imaginative play inside. Okay. And something I also like to target is sequential. So for instance, if we're doing cooking, then it makes sense to wash it, cut it and then cook it. Not the other way around. Right. So let them understand that there's a sequence to everything. So. So let's talk about speech problems. What are speech problems? Basically, there's some mispronunciation of certain sounds or certain errors in their everyday speech. And to be 100% sure about what sounds that your child is lacking and why, you should always see a speech therapist. Because to have a full assessment and to understand the reason behind a speech disorder is very, very important to treat it. Okay, so go see someone who is qualified. And at the same time, if you want to hold off for a little bit, there's a whole list of sounds for three year olds. There's a whole chart down, a link down below that you can see what sounds they should have. What sounds they still can are like dismissible. As in it's fine for them to not have those sounds. Like for instance, S Rs. These are totally fine for them to not acquire it. Yet. What else can you do if you need to see a speech therapist so you can build some phonological awareness, which means the knowledge about sounds. Okay, since they're three, they're a little older now you can sit them down and start reading storybooks. Okay, and what kind of books can you read? Preferably that they're books that rhyme, that give them a sense of like, oh, there's actually rhyming. I'll put an example right here or in the description box. And at the same time you can also sing songs. When you sing, you can also teach them to clap at each syllable, building that knowledge about, you know, number of syllables in a word. So many times I See, children who have a speech problem, they will struggle with higher number of syllables in a word. For instance, if they say something like chocolate, they might say chocolate, something like that. They eat the middle syllable and it's gone. So if you clap it, you say chocolate like that, it makes it easier for them to visualize, hear it, and understand. A number of syllables, therefore will help them with phonological awareness. You can also emphasize the sounds that they don't have. For instance, if they have a problem with the k sound or the t sound. Every time you say a word that has that sound. For instance, when I said time, I was like, yeah, time, yeah has a t sound. If you emphasize that many, many times a child would pick on and they will know, oh, yeah, that has a t sound. This has a t sound. That also has. That's phonological awareness, awareness towards where the sounds are. So let's talk about language. Now, what kind of language level is your child? If your child is non verbal, then teach some imitation, teach some gestures, teach sign language, use pecs. Okay. Again, at the discretion of your speech therapist, is your child at one word level. Great. Then teach them more verbs so that they can link a verb to a noun. Most of the time, children are skewed towards having more nouns than verbs or adjectives. And the reason behind it is because everyone's asking, what is that? What is that? What is that? And on YouTube, they're teaching a lot of, like, labels, like a vegetable, song, carrot, asparagus, whatever. They like to teach labeling. And therefore no one actually labels the verbs. So you should teach the verb so that they can put them together. Okay. Like for instance, if you teach put, cut, throw, you can put those words together. Like, I don't know when you would throw a carrot, but at least you can put it together. Other than that, you can also teach a lot more subjects. People use the dollhouse. For instance, teach like boy, girl, so that later on you can target the subject plus the verb. And then ultimately like svo, subject, verb, object. And then after that you can target specific. After that, okay, you can target specific sentence structures. Teach certain sentence structures that are very functional, meaning something like someone is verbing, something like meng is wearing glasses, Meng is drinking water. Like that. You can change the subject, the verb, and the object accordingly so that you know that they already have acquired that sentence structure. So I was saying that a lot of parents and whoever teachers like to target what questions? What's that? What's that? What's that? I would encourage you to teach more Question types like what function? Like, for instance, what does that do? What does a knife do? Cutting. Right. What does a spoon do? Scoop. And what does the chair do? Let you sit. Okay, so these type of questions are great. What else? Who, where, what doing? For instance, who is that? Who's wearing the gray shirt? Ming. Who's wearing glasses? Also Ming. Who's watching the video right now? Mom or dad. Right? These kind of who questions. Well, if you point to someone and say, who's that? That's actually a what question. Right. Because that's a labeling question. If you ask who is wearing red shoes, then it's. They have to think, okay, they don't suddenly just point to the shoes. They need to point to the person who's wearing the red shoes. There's some very generic questions that children can remember, like, where do you live? Where do you go to bat? Where do you go pee pee? Where do you go listen to songs? Or what do you watch a movie? Like that. Or you could ask something more like situational, where they have to use the brain. For instance, where is the remote? On top of the counter. Okay. Where is mommy right now? Oh, in the kitchen. Right. If your child is already speaking in sentences, how can you help? Okay, how can you help? That's easy. When you hear a sentence, for instance, they might say something that is a little grammatically wrong. They might say, mommy eat something like that. Or mommy eats apple. That's still okay, right? So you can recast it, rephrase the whole thing, and say, mommy is eating the apple. That's right. Mommy is eating the apple. Yeah. Or when you finish, it's like, mommy ate the apple. Mommy finished eating apple. Okay. Or when they say something like open door, you can recast it, reframe it, and say, oh, Mommy, please open the door. Or open the door. Something like that. Make it longer in the right grammatical structure, and then tell them one more time. They don't need to repeat. It's just that you're telling them and you're letting them know. Oh, I get it. What you mean is this right? So if your child is already speaking in sentences, this will help a lot. Okay, this is the end of our video. Thank you for sticking with us. Before you leave, I want to give you a little gift. Go to agentsofspeech.com checklist, a full list of tools and toys that we recommend you to get. So with that said, thank you so much. I will see you in the next video real soon. Bye.