Speech Therapy for 5 Year Old at Home | Tips from a Speech Therapist

Hey, this is Ming here from Agents of Speech. I'm a speech therapist. Today we're gonna dive into speech therapy for five years old at home, or actually what you expect from speech therapy or whatever. And this might be a really long video because I have to cover all bases. So feel free to skip ahead. There are timestamps below. Just take a look. Those are the parts that you want to talk about or hear about. Okay, first of all, a five year old who has no language or speech disorder, delay, whatever, they should be speaking as much as I am right now to the camera. The language is pretty much adult form. So you would expect them to be able to tell you stories, speaking complex sentences, describe things and also explain things, ask you why bother you by all the talking back and whatever, right? And sometimes they might have some articulation errors, meaning they mispronounce some words, especially with consonants like the R sound or like consonant blends with. Which are all totally acceptable at five years old. Okay? So with that out of the way, if your child, if you're watching this video, it means that your child might be having some speech and language problems, right? Here are some suggestions about what you should expect or what you can do at home. Okay, first of all, you need to identify whether your child is a speech or language case. Okay? So a speech case is where they have problems pronouncing certain sounds or words or whatever. And that's an articulation issue. Or, you know, we're not going to dive deep into what a speech disorder is here, but basically it's just about that them forming the sounds with their mouth, right? Are they doing it correct or wrong? Okay. Language, on the other hand, is about a lot more stuff. For instance, their sentence forming, are they speaking in words? Do they have enough vocabs or can they put sentences together to form a well, well formed story? You know, and you need to know which problem it is so that you can think about, oh, I should focus on teaching them more language based stuff or you should go ahead and just focus on their pronunciation. Okay? Those are the two things you need to remember. And most of the time it's both okay, because it affects each other. If a child mispronounces a lot of the words right, then they're inclined to not use words as often as, you know, typical kids. Then what's going to happen is that they don't get as enough practice to help them with their language. And therefore they kind of. They also lag behind in the language department. All right? So you have to Speak to a therapist, do a thorough assessment to take a look at their language, speech and language profile and you will get a better understanding about your kid. If your child is a speech case, okay, then see a therapist. The reason behind the speech case is very important. Okay? There are two types of speech disorders as, as a. Just the umbrella, just very simplified. One is organic, one is functional. It sounds crazy. Let, let me just tell you what it means, okay? Functional disorder means there's no main cause. You don't know why. It's just that somehow some, there's nothing wrong with their mouth or structures or whatever, the muscles or whatever. It just somehow they had a problem with it. Okay. They don't know what. And I'm going to put a link below from asha, which is the American Speech and Hearing Association Mouthful, a link down below and you can check out exactly what it is. But basically organic and functional. Functional is that there's no main causes, it's just that somehow they didn't pick it up. Right. Second of all, organic means that is organic. There's an organic problem, right? It might be that they are. Muscles are weaker, right? And that's called disastrous. They, they have motor planning issues and that's apraxia speech. Okay. Or they, they might have other things that affect them organically that they cannot say the words properly. Like maybe a cleft palate or, or lip tie or whatever these are. You know, you need to see a therapist to know the cause. Okay. Sometimes it's mixed. Well, knowing the reason for a speech disorder or delay will help with choosing a treatment plan for your child. Okay. Specifically. All right, so let's get that out of the way. The second one is if the language case, then you need to know what language level your child is at. Okay? It's important where your child's language level stands. Okay. A lot of the times when you get assessment, you will get a language age which is, oh, your child is equivalent of, I don't know, three or four year old in terms of language or in terms of expressive and receptive. Expressive meaning how much they can talk. Receptive meaning how much they can understand. Okay? So you need to know where your child stands in terms of language. But you need to think about in a few stages that I like to always use it as a way to explain to parents. Like number one, are they non verbal, they don't have any sounds or words or whatever that are meaningful yet. Number two, are they stuck on like one single word for every utterance? Meaning, are they only using single words to Talk to you. Right. Number two is like they're at two to three word level. They're not totally grammatically correct. And the next stage is where they're not very good with verbal reasoning. They can talk, but they won't answer your questions. Like why is the table wet? You know, that kind of why questions that they don't really know how to answer. Right. And then after that, the next stage would be like storytelling and then mixed with academic stuff inside, they're learning how to use language, tell stories and, and solve problems and so on. And the last one would be like social training. So all of these are in the link below in the timestamp. So if anytime you need help and you want to check it out, just click to the. To the place at the level where you think your child is. All right, let's start off with non verbal level. So if your child is non verbal At 5 years old, there can be a load of reasons why this is the case. Okay? I'm pretty sure that I will be a mix of speech and language issues. If a child is at 5 and is non verbal most of the time, you should still continue to tempt your child to communicate. All right? If your child isn't speaking it, obviously the ultimate goal is to get the speech. But in between that, between your child being physically unable to make speech sounds, right, we should give them some alternative methods such as, you know, using pecs, Picture Exchange Communication System, really Long Word Augmentative Com. Alternative communication. AAC is what they use like a iPad thing where they can like communicate with you through a device or whatever. Or it's just good old sign language that they can sign to you what they want from you. Right? These are the ways that they can communicate with you before speech comes into their life. Okay? And don't be discouraged because I've seen many, many cases where speech does come after these are implemented. Right? But I'm not telling you that this thing will stick with them for the, for their whole lives. Okay? It will come back later on maybe if they need even more language support to learn something. But at least you need a system for them to learn language. If speech isn't an option for you right now, for your child right now, then you need those things to help them to create a system for them to learn. Okay? If you don't have that, then they're just going to shut off and just gradually not communicate with you and therefore fall, fall even more behind. Right? Okay, so enough of that depressing note. Let's talk about what you need to be actively doing. You need to keep up that communication with different ways. Right. Number one. Number two is that you're actively trying to teach your child to imitate speech sounds. Why do we need that? Because we need that to diagnose your child's current speech ability. Okay, so let's say if you go to your child and say, hey, Charles, say hi. And then he doesn't say anything. How do I know? How would anyone know? How would a therapist know what errors are there, why he's making these errors? Why if the child doesn't even make an attempt to imitate you? Okay, so if your child doesn't imitate you yet, that's the first thing you need to do. Okay, you gotta do that. You gotta make them imitate. Because first of all is a pre linguistic skill, meaning it's a prerequisite skill for a child to learn a language. That's number one. Number two is what I've just said. You need it to know what helps them for diagnosis and why they cannot do something and so on. Right. So if you want to learn about this more about teaching imitation to nonverbal children, we have a guide for it. So go down there and click on it. It's agents of speech.com nonverbal guide. And it tells you like the three step process that I teach parents how to get imitation, verbal imitation done. Okay. All right, next step. Next level is a single word level. At single word level, your child should be talking to you in like one words. Maybe sometimes the words aren't 100% correct, meaning they use the same words for different things because they're not like entirely up to speed with the vocab. So therefore, the first thing you need to do is to expand your child's vocab as much as possible. Okay. There's a magical number for every child. Kid, I believe. And there's loads and loads of research out there. Talking O50, 101, 150 or 200, whatever, doesn't matter. The more the merrier. So you need to teach them as much vocab as possible. All right, so how do you do that? Basically, you can use a lot of different ways you can do play based teaching them the verbs going into each motion of the toy. So for instance, if you're playing with a car slide, which we have a video about, you know, you can go check it out in our YouTube channel. Maybe I'll link it here somewhere. And then every time you let go, 1, 2, 3, go, it goes down, right? And then when they have to get it from you, then they will also need to say something like, oh, give me or I want a car or whatever. A red car. Right? So you're teaching them many, many vocabs with play. Or you can also use flashcards, which is, you know, frowned upon in the therapist world because you know, it's not 100% naturalistic. Right. But it's easy for you as a parent. It's, it's easy to implement. It's quick and snappy. It's done right and it's convenient. So therefore I, I would tell you to do both. Right, do play and also with flashcards. Okay. We, we covered this in one of our online courses called the micro course. It's an agents of speech.com. go check it out if you want to. And then once you have enough of those words, the next step is that you need to systematically teach your child different phrases and sentences with the words that they know. And that's how you learn how to put words together to describe something that is exact. Okay, we, we have a whole video about this and to skip you all the pain just we have more details. Watch this 30 minute word combining class. The link is in the description below. I'll just put it here as well. Agents of speech.com combining class. And it's a 30 minute video. You watch it and you learn a lot. Okay, Just go there and take a look. It's absolutely free. Okay, the next level is a two to three word level. Two to three word level is where your child is using simple sentences to describe things that he or she sees. Okay. So if they can say that oh my cat's over here, I can say cat is sitting on the computer, whatever. So they, they can use these words to describe to you. And we're not talking about like children who can say I want cookie or I want whatever. This is a cup, this is a table, that's a brown chair that we don't want that we want descriptive language. Okay. We don't want children who are want based on. And also they will only talk when you instruct them to. None of that. We want two to three word level children to be able to point out stuff and start commenting number one and start to regulate your behavior with their speech like mom sit over there, right? Something like that. Or daddy read the newspaper, you know, or whatever. They need to be able to command, to instruct, to comment to, to talk to you basically with two to three words and flexibly not to always put I want. This is a whatever all jumbled up like that. Okay. It needs to be different words every time. Okay. So that is what I think two to three word level is. All right. How we get onto the next level is that you need to start teaching your child more and more different sentences through a very naturalistic way. It might be true that you have a very like, low to play scenarios. Right. And your job at home is just to play as much as you can with the child whilst giving them, showing the models of language that will help them. Okay. And some people will call up me, Lu or Milo, I don't know which one, to be honest. And how you do it is just you keep on playing it, creating a routine, telling them what to do whilst describing what they're doing to them. And therefore they will describe it back to you hopefully. Okay. There's not much way of like getting them to sit down structurally and go through like flashcards of different sentence types. That's not going to work 100% here because we don't want them to, to be like demand based. Right? We don't want them to, oh, what's happening here, what's happening there? We don't want that. We just want them to talk. So therefore, at two to three word level, your job is to do as much place sequences as you can. Okay. And we do have some videos in Agents of Speech. There's a whole playlist about how to play with toys. You can check that out as well. Um, the next level is verbal reasoning. And this is when children start to speak in like just a hundred percent full sentences and that they can also speak in grammatically correct sentences. Right. The next step is to get them to use the language, explain something to us. So in the previous level, they've been describing and whatever and commanding us, instructing us. Now in verbal reasoning, they have to explain something which is historically difficult for anyone who is trying to learn a new language. You know, like for me, I cannot explain something very well in a language that I don't really know very well. Okay. So I'm, I'm not sure if that's the same for you. So this is where you use the games and the toys that you've taught your child and start to do the wrong things. Right? You start to do the wrong thing. And we have a great video on how to do it with Mr. Potato Head. You can again, you can go take a look. There's loads of resources on this channel, so take a look at it if you can. All right, about Mr. Potato Head. Go there, check it out. And how we do it is that we do the wrong things. We create a play sequence and it goes outside of what the child is comfortable with it. And then what we do is we teach them to answer questions like, for instance, you make them say no. So for instance, if you're playing a board game and then you take like three steps instead of two and then the child says, no mom, no, no dad. And then you're like, why? Oh, because the dice says three. Oh, I get it. Okay. One, two, three. There you go. Right, so you need to start teaching some simple whys that are attached to a certain context. I know this is an oversimplification of this, but you know, if you have any questions to put it in the comment section below, I'll try my best to answer them. This really comes down is pretty hard. It's hard stuff for you. So therefore, if I want to teach you it, I want to make sure that you understand it. So therefore, maybe later on we will make a YouTube video about it. But we're currently working on a whole full fledged online course for verbal reasoning that I will update later on if you see it and the description below. Okay, so storytelling is the next level. And this is where your child might be at 5 to 6 years old. Because most speech therapy at this age range, what therapists like me who are doing is like, ah, telling stories, you know, acting up stuff, playing games, especially board games. Because storytelling works on a whole bunch of different language goals in one go. Okay. There's different vocabs in the story that you can point out and learn in the, the book, Right. Can you remember how many children learned the different names of the fruit through that very hungry caterpillar? Right. For me, I still remember. It was excellent, excellent book. I remembered I, I learned how to count, I learned how to the, the new fruit names. Right? And I'm sure that after like 20 plus years, it's still doing the same thing. So therefore, when you have a storybook that has different things and feelings and new words and scenarios, it helps the child to pick up meaning, new knowledge. Okay, that's first. Second of all, it's academically appropriate, okay? A lot of schools and a lot of kindergartens are, or, I don't know, primary schools, they do use stories to teach. Okay. And having the understanding for stories will help your child a lot in transitioning into school, all right? And most importantly of all, it teaches the child to express themselves in a very coherent manner, giving them a structure. And you see that sometimes when we talk, when I Talk. I need a lot of visual cues, right. I will bring out stories to help me remember things, and that will actually help children to express themselves with the guidance of pictures. Okay. It's an important skill to learn to be able to describe something and with appropriate amount of information. For instance, if you're telling a story from, I don't know, Marvel, you need to have the time place characters involved, the motivations, you know, the problems, the solutions. You know, just thinking out loud, if we're talking about like a very classic movie, like maybe like Avengers right now. Right. The time place characters, very easy after Thanos snapped his fingers on Earth. Right. Basically. And there's different places that they need to talk about. That's why they have the place thing down below the titles. Right. And then you have the characters involved. You have to talk about everyone, their motivations, why they're like this, so on and so forth, the problems and then the solutions or the setbacks are. And so on. Right. If a child is able to tell a story like that, they can report anything verbally. Okay. So these skills can be generalized towards other places in your child's academics or speech coherence. Right. And this is very important. So this is like storytelling on its own is super difficult. What I'm prepared to do is like to ask someone who is more versed in, more well versed in storytelling, and bring them on to Asians of speech and tell you guys a little bit more about that. So later on we'll have a full fledged video about it, but. But not now. Okay. And the last stage for training is more about social training. Social training is more for your child to generalize what they learned with you in the clinic room or at home, basically, and to use it in real life. Okay. How to make the transition and make them into a smooth experience. Right. So sometimes, and most of the time, we do this for children who are on the autism spectrum. Okay. And where his or her language isn't bad at all. They can talk in sentences, they can like describe everything and so on, so forth. It's just that they can't see the appropriate things at the appropriate time, which is sad because, you know, they have so much ability. All they need to do now is to use it. Okay. Then you should get your child into therapy to help them to mingle with other children and mingle with other people. Okay. And how you do that is through group setting. This is very difficult to do at home because home itself is a very set context unless you have a play date, whether you children which is a very good idea, by the way. You should transition from one to one into a group setting and later on help them. If your child is on the spectrum and needs a little extra help, ask for a shadow teacher or like a learning support to help them in the classroom. Okay. But social training is where you. You identify the problems of the behavior. Let's say the distance between someone when they're talking is too close, which happens a lot, by the way. Then you have to tell them, hey, this behavior, you know, identify it, tell them it's not cool. Hey, it's not cool. Why? Because when you're this close to people, people don't feel comfortable. Okay. Make an analogy. Something that they're not comfortable about as well. Maybe some children, they don't like it when you touch their toys. Don't like it when they. They're given certain textures. Give that analogy is as comfortable as when you feel this. And then they know. All right, okay. So it's not a good thing in their lenses. Okay, I kind of get it now. And then after that, you need to do a bunch of role plays and try to help them to go through it with. With other children. Like, do it. Do a role play with you with an adult first, and then do it with another child who is. Doesn't have this problem. Do it a few times. And then when they're in a group, regulate that behavior and tell them, evaluate them after the session. Say, hey, did you do this just now? Oh, no, you didn't. Very good. Excellent job. You didn't do this, you didn't do that, you didn't this. Well, whatever. Right? And then slowly, they will learn how to evaluate themselves, identify when they. When they do it, and then they will learn how to generalize those behaviors into the correct, appropriate social skills. Okay. And other than that, the language skills are the same. Right? When you're talking, are you talking in, like, at least three to four words? You know, this can be a rule as well. Why should you talk in three to four words? Well, because if you don't speak accurately, people will keep on asking you questions, and it's not fun for you anyways. Right? So when you explain to them in that way and give them a systematic approach to going from one to one with an adult and then one to like, like two or three with other children or with other adults, and then slowly generalizing it towards a group setting and then the school setting with the shadow teacher, and bake in all those, like, evaluations, identifying behaviors, telling them how they. Good did and so on. It will help your child immensely in in terms of their speech and language and also the behaviors if they are on the spectrum. Okay, here you need to ask more outside help for your child. You need someone who can help you out to create those behavioral goals, especially at social skills level. If you want more of this content, we can talk about this more. But this is very, very, very highly personalized. If you need any help, just email me. Okay? My email is MingAgentSofSpeech.com if you ever need help. Okay. So thank you so much. To conclude, at 5 years old, your child's speech and language ability could be like huge because you know, by the time a typically developing child is at 5 10, they're pretty much adult. 4. The language and their speech abilities. We're talking about verbal skills, not written. Obviously the written would be a lot less coherent than us, but at the very least, when you talk to a five year old who is typical, you know, it's very easy to tell them something, to explain to them something, even have an argument sometimes. Okay, so that's it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope to see you in the next video very soon. Bye Bye.