| There are many positive educational techniques which you can carry out with your child at home. Please feel free to e-mail me with more suggestions. |
| Some limericks and other ideas for articulation practice at The Homeschool Page. |
| In the early years when your dyspraxic child is unable to clearly communicate by speech, sign language is the answer. In my opinion, any dialect of sign language will do. The object is to enable your child to continue learning and expressing himself and to remove the obstacle of non-communication. Generally, dyspraxic children figure out quite quickly that they need to learn another means of language. They are great at gesturing, pulling their parents to the desired object, pointing and using facial expressions. Sign language greatly extends their language and reduces the frustration which often builds up within a highly expressive individual. I would recommend that you learn the sign language used most widely by the deaf people in your country. I learned New Zealand Sign Language alongside my son. This means that there will be an entire community of people out there who will be able to communicate with your child readily. Otherwise, use the sign language used by the people who will be with him most during the day (such as teachers). There are various means by which to learn sign language. There are books which you can borrow from your local library, video tapes and CD-ROMs. There are usually courses which teach sign language also. I bought a series of video tapes from the Kelston Deaf Education Centre here in New Zealand. They worked marvellously. Start with the useful words such as your child's favourite food, drink and subjects. We started with animal names because my son was very interested in animals at that stage. Sign language is also useful later on for visual cueing of speech. |
| It sounds very simple, but slowing down your speech and speaking very clearly is one of the most effective ways to help your child. When teaching dyspraxic children to talk, it is a good idea to address both language structure and articulation. Don't focus only on articulation. One thing which I did was to simplify my speech. I would use sentences consisting of a maximum of 5 words (if this was possible). It is amazing how complex, adult speech can be. I also tried to use very basic words when speaking to my son. Encourage your child to look at your mouth when you speak. Just indicate - don't force it. Dyspraxic children are renowned for not looking at people's mouths. Early on, there was nothing I could do to get my son to focus on my mouth. I just kept reminding him and when he started to have some success with pronouncing sounds consistently, he started to notice my mouth movements. I don't think this was a coincidence. Imitation is a great learning tool, but only if your speech apparatus is developmentally ready for the movements. |
| A database is a great idea for being able to record the speech progress of your child. What you do is record your child's attempts at various words. You create a table with about 6 columns. The first column is headed "Actual Word" and then the other columns are headed "Word 1", "Word 2", etc. When your child attempts to say a word, you record the actual word in the Actual Word column, and their first attempt in the Word 1 column. With time, their attempt at that word will get closer to the real word. You then record their next attempt in the Word 2 column, the one after that in the Word 3 column, and so on. This accomplishes two things; firstly, you can see at a glance how your child is progressing in his speech. You can see that progress is being made, even if it is slow. This can be quite encouraging during the plateau stages when it seems that your child's speech is at a stand-still. Secondly, you can use the database as a dictionary. This works in a similar way to an Italian-English/English-Italian dictionary, except that the language is that of your dyspraxic child and not Italian. You can use the database to figure out which word your child is trying to say. This is especially helpful if your child uses a similar sounding word for a few different meanings. You can run through the various options quickly with your child and discover which word he means. This is another good way of reducing your child's frustration. |
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CopyrightŠ1999.Jackie