Summer Speech Therapy: Maximize Your Child's Time Off
School's out for summer! It's time to trade in textbooks for pool floats and unwind from the busy school year. But while summer break is a well-deserved time for relaxation and fun, it can also be a fantastic opportunity for your child to keep working on their speech and language development!
Let's explore some creative ways to leverage this extra time and turn summer break into a season of learning and growth.
Key Takeaways:
Turn Everyday Activities into Games: Summer adventures become speech therapy opportunities! Incorporate target sounds into scavenger hunts, playground games, or rhyming challenges.
Short & Consistent Practice: While summer schedules can be busy, aim for frequent, shorter practice sessions throughout the week. Frequent, short sessions keep things engaging and help retain information.
Stay Connected with Your Child's SLP: Update your child's SLP on progress and challenges. They can offer guidance and tailor home practice activities.
Celebrate the Journey! Focus on celebrating your child's efforts, no matter how small. Positive reinforcement keeps them motivated and enthusiastic about speech development.
Why Consider Summer Speech Therapy?
Benefits of Summer Speech Therapy
Making Summer Speech Therapy Fun and Effective
Creative Speech Therapy Activities You Can Try This Summer
How Connected Speech Pathology Can Help Your Child Over the Summer Break
Why Consider Summer Speech Therapy?
Summer vacation often includes images of lazy days, carefree fun, and a break from routine. However, summer can also be a strategic time to make significant progress for children working on speech and language goals. Here's why considering summer services can be a winning decision:
Avoiding the "Summer Slide"
Children naturally experience some learning regression during breaks. This "summer slide" can also impact speech and language development. Practicing articulation and language concepts helps maintain momentum and prevents skills from slipping.
Consistent practice throughout the summer ensures your child retains what they've learned during the school year in terms of both clear speech production and language skills and builds upon that foundation.
Focused Practice and Personalized Attention
Summer offers valuable, dedicated time for speech therapy. Free from the constraints of a busy school schedule, shorter, more frequent sessions can be tailored to your child's individual needs.
Speech therapists can delve deeper into specific challenges, whether mastering certain sounds, using language skills more effectively to express themselves, or understanding the nuances of communication. Personalized attention can be difficult to achieve during the school year when the attention is placed on many more students.
Benefits of Summer Speech Therapy
Here are some key benefits of pursuing speech therapy during the summer months:
Catch Up and Make Progress
The school year can be a whirlwind. Sometimes, specific speech or language goals don't get the focused attention they deserve. Summer provides a dedicated window to address these areas. Whether mastering a target sound, improving fluency, or developing stronger vocabulary skills, summer speech therapy allows your child to catch up on missed milestones and make significant progress in a shorter time frame.
Flexible Scheduling
Summertime offers the flexibility to tailor speech therapy appointments around your family's vacation plans, summer camps, or other activities. The convenience and flexibility ensure consistent practice and avoid disruptions that can slow progress.
Fun and Engaging Activities
Speech therapy doesn't have to be confined to an indoor space! Enjoy the change in weather and engage in outdoor activities and seasonal themes in speech therapy sessions. You can practice target sounds while building sandcastles at the beach or creating a nature scavenger hunt that targets vocabulary words. These creative approaches make therapy sessions more enjoyable and keep your child motivated.
Strengthen Family Involvement
Summer's relaxed atmosphere allows for greater family involvement in therapy sessions. Speech-language pathologists can provide strategies and exercises that the whole family can practice together, creating a supportive environment for learning and reinforcing communication skills. A collaborative approach strengthens family bonds and empowers everyone to participate.
Summer speech therapy offers a unique opportunity to address communication challenges, build confidence, and create lasting summer memories.
Making Summer Speech Therapy Fun and Effective
Here are some tips to make summer sessions enjoyable, effective, and full of learning:
Collaborate with Your Therapist
The key to successful summer speech therapy starts with open communication. Discuss your child's summer plans and goals with your speech-language pathologist. Your speech therapist can tailor therapy activities to your child's interests and integrate them seamlessly into your summer adventures.
Summer Themed Activities
Let's say your child is working on mastering the "L" sound. Setting up a lemonade stand becomes a fantastic practice session. Role-playing customer interactions encourage clear pronunciation of "lemonade" and "dollar." Similarly, planning a backyard BBQ can involve practicing grill-related vocabulary words or creating a shopping list targeting specific sounds. You can work on smooth speech while following a recipe for children with fluency disorders.
Everyday Opportunities
A trip to the beach can be a treasure trove of descriptive words. Encourage your child to describe the sights, sounds, and textures they encounter - the warm sand between their toes, the crashing waves, or the colorful seashells they collect. These everyday interactions provide natural opportunities to practice vocabulary, language comprehension, fluent speech, and clear speech production.
Technology Integration
Consider incorporating engaging speech therapy apps or online resources to supplement your child's summer practice. Many resources offer interactive games and activities that target specific speech and language skills in a fun and visually stimulating way. Here are a few examples:
Articulation Games: Apps like "Articulate It!" or "Speech Monster" use engaging visuals and sound effects to help children practice producing specific sounds. These games can be customized to target your child's needs and often incorporate following directions as part of the gameplay (e.g., "Touch the picture of the cat that says /k/").
Storytelling Apps: Resources like "Story Champs" or "My PlayHome Stories" allow children to create interactive stories using pictures, audio recordings, and text. These apps encourage creative thinking, narrative skills, and vocabulary development. Many incorporate following multi-step directions as part of the storytelling process (e.g., "Drag the boy to the park, then have him climb the slide").
Educational Websites: Websites like "PBS Kids" or "Learning Games for Kids" offer a variety of speech-related activities and games. These can target following directions through interactive exercises that involve answering questions and completing tasks on the screen (e.g., "Click on the red ball" or "Drag the blue car to the garage").
Apps and website tools should complement, not replace, traditional therapy sessions with a qualified speech therapist. Your speech therapist can recommend specific apps or websites that align with your child's goals and provide guidance on integrating them into your summer routine.
By incorporating these creative activities, technology, and collaboration with your speech-language pathologist, you can transform summer break into a season of learning and progress.
Creative Speech Therapy Activities You Can Try This Summer
Here are some creative activities you can try at home or on-the-go to make speech practice enjoyable and effective:
Library Adventures
Storytelling Twists: Head to your local library and pick a children's book. Parents and children can take turns reading pages aloud but with a twist! Pause mid-sentence and have your child predict what happens next or invent a silly ending. When you ask your child to complete the ending, it encourages creative thinking, using descriptive language, and narrative skills.
Rhyming Charades: Choose a few rhyme-filled children's books. Read a rhyme together, then have your child act it out without speaking. You can then take turns guessing the rhyme based on their actions! This activity targets rhyming skills, vocabulary development, and turn-taking during a conversation.
Drawing and Describing
Mystery Masterpieces: Have your child make a sculpture out of modeling clay, but don't reveal it! Encourage them to describe their sculpture in detail using as many words as possible. You can then take turns guessing what the sculpture depicts. This activity dresses vocabulary development, fluency, sentence structure, and clear articulation.
Draw Pictures: Parents and children can draw pictures on paper and describe them aloud, using phrases like "I spy with my little eye something that is..." The other person then guesses the object based on your description. Alternatively, you can ask your children to follow directions such as "Use the red crayon and draw two lines under the truck." As you can see, you can address receptive and expressive language goals and the child's target speech sounds.
Sensory Play
Blow Bubbles of Fun: Blow bubbles together outdoors and have your child practice catching them using different body parts (hands, elbows, knees). Encourage them to describe the bubbles' size, color, and movement. This activity works on coordination, descriptive language skills, and following simple directions.
Water Balloon Word Splash: Fill water balloons with slips of paper containing target vocabulary words for your child. Have them toss the balloons at a target and then say the word written on the paper they pop. This outdoor activity is a refreshing way to practice articulation and vocabulary in a fun outdoor setting.
The key is to keep things engaging and positive! Focus on celebrating your child's effort and progress, no matter how small. By incorporating these creative activities into your summer routine, you can transform speech therapy into a fun and enriching experience for your child.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What age is best for speech therapy?
There's no single "best" age for speech therapy. If a child is experiencing communication challenges, it can be beneficial at any stage of development. Early intervention is ideal, but children of all ages can make significant progress with speech therapy.
2. Is three too late for speech therapy?
Absolutely not! While early intervention is preferred, children of all ages can benefit from speech therapy. By age 3, most children should use simple sentences and clearly communicate their needs. If you have concerns about your child's speech development at any age, don't hesitate to seek a professional evaluation.
3. How do you know if a child needs speech therapy?
Several signs may indicate your child could benefit from speech therapy. These include difficulty producing certain sounds, limited vocabulary, trouble understanding language, or problems with using language to communicate effectively. If you have any concerns, talk to your child's pediatrician for a referral to a qualified speech-language pathologist (SLP) for an evaluation.
4. Can speech therapy cure speech delay?
Speech therapy doesn't necessarily "cure" speech delay but can significantly improve a child's communication skills. Therapy can help children develop clear speech, understand and use language more effectively, and improve their overall confidence in communication.
How Connected Speech Pathology Can Help Your Child Over the Summer Break
At Connected Speech Pathology, our team of dedicated speech therapists is passionate about helping children overcome speech and language challenges. We achieve this through personalized therapy plans, engaging activities, and a collaborative approach with families.
Our speech therapists take the time to understand each child's unique needs and goals. We create customized treatment plans that are both fun and effective, utilizing play-based learning to keep children motivated. We believe parents and caregivers play a vital role in a child's communication development.
That's why we equip you with the tools and strategies to support your child's progress at home, fostering communication skills throughout their daily routine. We also prioritize clear communication with you, providing regular updates and collaborating to ensure your child reaches their full potential.
Our services are provided online, so you can conveniently schedule your speech therapy sessions with us. Contact Connected Speech Pathology today, and let's start working together!
Summary
Summer break doesn't have to mean a halt in your child's speech development! Summer speech therapy can be a fun and effective way to keep your child engaged and making progress. By incorporating creative activities, technology, and collaboration with therapists, you can transform your child's summer into a season of learning and communication growth.
About the Author
Allison Geller is a speech-language pathologist (SLP) and the owner of Connected Speech Pathology. She obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Florida in Speech-Language Pathology. Allison has practiced speech therapy in a number of settings including telepractice, acute care, outpatient rehabilitation, and private practice. She has worked extensively with individuals across the lifespan including toddlers, preschoolers, school-aged children, and adults. She specializes in the evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment of a variety of communication disorders including receptive/expressive language disorders, articulation disorders, voice disorders, fluency disorders, brain injury, and swallowing disorders.
Allison served as the clinical coordinator of research in aphasia in the Neurological Institute at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. She is on the Board of Directors for the Corporate Speech Pathology Network (CORSPAN), a Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT) certified clinician, and a proud Family Empowerment Scholarship/Step-Up For Students provider. Allison is passionate about delivering high quality-effective treatment remotely because it’s convenient and easy to access. What sets us apart from other online speech therapy options is—Allison takes great care to hire the very best SLPs from all over the country.
