By: Elyse Schultz M.S., CCC-SLP
We get frequent inquiries and requests to collaborate with classroom teachers to help support a child’s articulation goals in the classroom. Sometimes teachers have opportunities for 1:1 time with their students and other times they are busy managing the entire classroom. There are ways to support articulation in either scenario. While every speech sound has different demands and clients are at different levels or stages of therapy, here are a few general tips to support articulation in the classroom. We encourage discussions with classroom teachers to identify more specific strategies based on the child’s individual needs.
- Learn the verbal, tactile, visual, or gestural cues used in therapy to carry over in the classroom. For example, an /s/ sound could be called a “snake sound”.
- Find out what level the child is at (e.g., the word level, conversational level), so you know when and how to correct them. For example, if they are working on /l/ sound in isolation, we do not expect them to be corrected in single words.
- Involve the whole classroom when you can so the child does not feel singled out. For example, for the /sh/ sound, “Can everyone round their lips to make the quiet sound?”
- Monitor reading and writing skills as they pertain to specific misarticulated sounds. For example, a child may write “wed” instead of “red” if they substitute /r/ with /w/.
Facilitate various communication partners and environments. For example, children working on generalizing their speech sounds to conversational speech, they can talk to teachers and different peers-in front of a group, at recess, during lunch, etc. Children often “turn on their sounds” when in the treatment room or when they are with their clinician, but generalizing speech production beyond the treatment room can be more challenging.