My Little Talker

My little Dragon is a precocious talker. He has a ton to say, and has an excellent grasp of language for his age. Only, he's got the ordinary little kid challenges with saying his consonants, and so it's often hard to understand him. According to this chart, it's completely developmentally normal that he can't quite twist his tongue around an S, F, L, SH, CH, and a couple of other sounds. Problem is, he doesn't know it's normal, all he knows is that sometimes he can't get an answer to his questions because the Daddy and I can't figure out what he's saying to us. Drat the asynchronous development!

Ordinarily, I wouldn't be too concerned, but he's getting frustrated enough with this situation that if I don't catch the question the first time, he'll cover his eyes and refuse to repeat it. I really don't want him to feel like asking questions isn't worth his effort, so I've been looking for some ideas to help him figure out how to get his tongue to twist around some of those tricky sounds. To that end, I've been looking at some speech therapy websites for ideas. Happily, there are some things we can try.

For instance, I don't know how informed the author of this eHow article is, but the idea of using a mirror makes a lot of sense (and can easily be a funny game), and he loves a straw, so we can do that too. And this one, from a speech website, has some good ideas for how to practice the sounds so that it's most effective. I like that too.

So, the plan is to look at the development chart and pick a sound that should be developing relatively soon anyhow, and see if we can't play some games to help him figure it out. Hopefully, it'll work and his frustration level will be reduced, cuz it just kills me to see him so frustrated and irritated that he's stopping trying to say what's on his mind.