Speech Therapy for 4 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 to help you do some home therapy during these quarantine times. Okay. And for four year olds, you should be able to get him or her to sit down for an extended period of time, meaning around 15 minutes a pop. And if your child cannot do this, my first advice is to actually try to teach your child how to sit down for some time because that's where you actually take some time to for them to learn from you. Right? And what I usually suggest is that you have a specific corner in the house or apartment where you put a kid's table. And every time your child sits there, they know they have to do something with you, they have to play with you. They would want to stick to that routine. Okay, so what if they don't like it? They run away. So I get this question all the time. All you gotta do is to pair it with the reward. All right? In the beginning it will be a little robotic. Okay. But then you have to fix certain rewards such as their favorite snacks like the iPad. Whenever they are there or your child is there, then they can have that in the beginning. And then slowly you will creep some therapy inside some work. And if your child right now at 4 is really, really likes baby toys, then you should try to shy away from that from now on. All right? And you should use some toys that are more age appropriate. So what are some age appropriate toys for 4 year olds? So for instance, some imaginative toys like dollhouses, right? Lego that they can stack up and make something else, doctor's kit or a restaurant kit or whatever kit that you can buy that they can pretend to be someone else and play with you. That's great. And last of all, I would also try to introduce some very simple board games like Chutes and Ladders. There's one I like called Funny Bunny and all these toys and tools, you can Download it at agentsofspeech.com Checklist of all the stuff that we recommend to parents who are wanting to start home therapy. All right, so what do you teach your child about? It really depends on what your child is like. That's why therapy is a very custom made, kind of tailor made kind of plan so your child can follow according to what they can and cannot do. Alright, so my first question is, is it a speech problem or a language problem? So if it's a speech problem, you must have already picked up some errors that you know that you know for sure that your child Cannot do, let's say, the S sound or the l sound or whatever. So if you cannot, then you would need to find a speech therapist to help you out about this. Okay. But if you can already, you can zero in on that. And you also ask some therapist or professional advice. What you can do next is to work on that specific sound for 15 minutes every day. Okay. Even if you don't do it perfectly, it's gonna help your child a lot. Okay. Even if you don't. Don't know what you're doing, but you know that specific sound, he's got some problems with it, Then you know, this is a really good way to really sit them down and to practice. So if it is a language problem, which means like how much they can actually understand and how much they can express, then my other question would be, does your child speak at all? Are they nonverbal or are they verbal? So if they're non verbal, then you have to think about, can they imitate what you say? If they cannot imitate words, then you want to go down and see if they can imitate sounds. If they cannot imitate sounds, then you would go down and try and get them to imitate some actions. So what I mean by actions is just like very easy, like tapping your shoulder, putting a head, like touching their nose, touching the mouth, that kind of actions. Okay. But once you get them to imitate those, you can actually teach some gestures. Okay, and what is gestures? Basically, it's kind of like sign language. Okay. But doesn't need to be very accurate, and it depends on your culture. All right. If you're American, then American Sign Language would be your best bet. All right. I'm from Hong Kong, so we have our own sign language system. And if your child is in a certain special education system, then having those skills that you teach them will put them forward a lot more in those educational environments. So let's say that your child can speak already, but just not enough. Right? Just not enough. So what can we do about that? What I usually recommend is that you have to create a fun game, right? You can use all the tools and toys we were talking about just now. And then when the thing happens, you tell them what's happening. And. And when your child speaks, you want to add one or two more words into the sentence. If they say something with only one word or two words, it's not specific enough for you to act upon it. Okay. Pretend that you are foolish and you don't know what you're doing. So an example is that if you're playing a board game and he says, mommy's turn right or daddy's turn. So it's not specific what you need to do next. You don't know what you need to do. So you might actually move your piece before rolling a dice. So that intrigues the child because it breaks routine. And then the child's like, no, that's wrong. They have to speak clearly. And this is where you can come in and help them and prompt them and tell them what you want them to say. So, for example, it might be that, oh, mommy rolled the dice, right? If they can say that, make it even longer with maybe first, mommy, roll the dice, something like that, or mommy, roll the dice first, doesn't really matter. But if it's about sentence length, this is how I would teach a child to do it. We have a whole other video about using gestures to help a child speak longer sentences. You can check it up, check it out, out here or something. And last of all is that if there's something wrong with a child's comprehension, there's something lacking in a child's comprehension. At four, Usually we are working with questions, okay? This is just a very general comment. At four years old, what we're working with is actually questions, okay? Questions such as who, where, maybe why. Sometimes if we're talking about a child who is just a little late. So these things, you can do it in a very structured way. For instance, if you're teaching who, you can use flashcards. I know that a lot of people out there who are very against flashcards, actually, I am myself. But for parents to have a very good structure to do at home, maybe flashcards is a better bet because it doesn't require a lot of skills. All you need to do is keep on asking, who, who, who, who, right? What I would say is, like, you can actually have a bunch of what cards, you know, objects and a bunch of people cards, who are who? Cards, right? Just to categorize it, which one is which? Is it a what or who? Right? And afterwards, as many times as you can, you can ask, who is this? Who is this? Who is this? The more you ask it, the better your child will understand that. Actually, the question type, okay? And you can do it with what, who and where? With flashcards. All right? But this is not the best case scenario because you have to generalize. All you're teaching right now is using flashcards to teach where and who. So how can you do it? Okay, so we talked about using board games, right? So after using board games, you can actually ask, whose turn is it? Whose piece is it? Who lost? Who won? These are questions that you can use to generalize. Okay? But the starting point is that your child knows how to play that board game. Okay, how about where? So some easy ideas about where is to use a dollhouse, right? So where do we go now? To the toilet, right? Oh, he's very sleepy. Where does he go? To the bedroom. Using a dollhouse? Using a board game, it helps a child to generalize the who and the where question, because if they answer something wrong, then you will do the wrong action and it really affects the game. So they don't want that to happen. All right, so for four year olds, I would say that in general, all right, if you're a parent, just only target one language goal at a time, or maybe one speech goal at a time. Do it for 15 to 20 minutes every day. And then what you do other than that is just language facilitation. And what is language facilitation? There are loads of resources online. You might be very puzzled and people are saying, oh, you gotta read this book called It Takes two to talk or something. In a nutshell, for four year olds, what you wanna do is that if your child is talking already, then you would want to add one or two more words at the back of it after you get what your child after you get what your child's trying to say to you. So for instance, if your child says like, mommy, drink or something when you're drinking something, then you can add on one or two words at the back or in front, right? You can say, oh, mommy's drinking coffee. That's right. Or like, yeah, mommy's drinking the Coca Cola, it's very delicious. Something like that. So you add more language into what they were already saying. This is a very good general advice that you can implement today at home with your child. And you should do this, like nearly every second every time that your child talks, okay? And other than that, you just spare like 15 or 20 minutes just to target one thing. Okay? If your child has a problem with, you know, the L sound or the S sound, then, you know, just target the L sound. Okay? If your child has problems with understanding the who or where question, just target the who question first. Right? Just do that for 15 minutes every day. I'm sure that even if you're not very confident in what you're doing right now, it's gonna push your child a little further every day towards the goal that you want, but only stick to what, because it keeps you and your child clear about what to do. So if you need any help, you can always put them in the comments section below. And if you haven't, you should go to agentsofspeech.com checklist to grab a bunch of tools and toys that we recommend to parents who are just starting out doing home therapy. And to be honest, right now we don't know when this quarantine or coronavirus will end. The so it's very cool that you are actually searching for this kind of information, and I hope this was helpful. If you liked it, then give it a like if you know there's anything that we need to work on, just tell tell us in the comment section below and we will be sure to improve. Okay, thank you very much for tuning in, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.