Both of my kids speak exceptionally well for their ages. No, that’s not just a proud Mommy statement. Last week was parent/teacher conference week at the kids’ school and both of their teachers also said that the girls were able to express themselves and their needs exceedingly well for their ages, and that they each had very large vocabularies and great sentence structure as well. Ok, saying all of that was proud Mommy bragging a little bit, but also true. And I just edited out a lot more bragging so you should be happy about that. J
Anyway, this week I figured we’d focus on our pronunciation. I think that if you could only hear Briana’s voice, you could not distinguish her from a five year old in the way that she speaks, other than pitch maybe. Abigail turns 2 this week and while the teachers and I have no trouble understanding her, I feel like her translator when we are talking to my friends, especially those without kids, and especially when we’re on the phone. So this lesson is primarily to help my Abigail articulate better.
As always, I start with some research to see where we are and what should be expected of the kids. According to the Mayo Clinic (http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/toddler-speech-development/AN01940):
“The average 2-year-old:
Speaks about 50 words, but understands even more
Links two words together
Uses simple adjectives, such as "big" and "happy"
Speaks clearly enough for parents to understand some of the words
The average 3-year-old:
Speaks 250 to 500 or more words
Speaks in three- and four-word sentences
Uses pronouns (I, you, we, they) and some plurals
States first name
By age 4, most kids speak clearly enough for strangers to understand.”
So according to them, Briana is speaking at least at a 4-year-old level and Abigail speaks like an average 3-year-old most of the time. That’s good to know. There’s always room for refinement though, I think.
I have to tell you, before I start, that my mom is kind-of formal. She still insists on having the kids call her “Grandmother”, which I was surprised that they both managed to say understandably by about 1 and a half. As a kid I remember my Mom always telling me “We speaK with our teeTH and our tonGUES.” All of the time! She always uses a ridiculous emphasis on the ending syllables that I capitalized to encourage us to enunciate properly. Trust me, it got old really fast, especially since she started when I was probably 2 myself and will still say it today if I start sounding “flat” to her, but now that I’m a mom, of course, I see value in doing some of the same things my mom did.
So I start off the week saying the most dreaded sentence of my childhood, “We speaK with our teeTH and our tonGUES.” Then I explain that we’re going to work on speaking clearly and enunciating this week.
1. Enunciation exercises
I borrowed this from the world of acting. To develop enunciation skills, actors will practice with tongue twisters. I found some good ones on:
We started with ‘she sells seashells down by the seashore’, which Briana can say as well as I can. Don’t know whether that’s good for Bree or if I’m the one that needs some vocal coaching. Then we did ‘Peter Piper’ and a few more. Abby did a respectable job on them all.
I decided to focus a little bit more. Since the hardest sounds for toddlers to say are, r’s, s’s, l’s, sh’s, th’s and ch’s, I tested Abby to see where she was. She can make all of the sounds in the absolute when asked to just say one word, but when she speaks in sentences she muddles the bl and pl sounds, so “blanket” sounds more like “bwanket” and “please” sounds like “pwease”. Every now and then the th, as in “throwing” becomes an f, as in “frowing” too. Apparently that’s common.
2. Games
After days of fruitless searching for good games that toddlers can do that also help with enunciation, I contacted the Master. A wonderful woman named Teresa who is the speech and language pathologist at the kids’ school. She suggested something that I would not have thought of. She said that usually the trouble that young kids have is that they are gaining so much vocabulary so quickly that they run the words together or they don’t take the time to monitor their own enunciation. That’s exactly what I saw with Abby. She can say the words if I asked her, but in a sentence she just goes too fast and forgets. Teresa further suggested that I should model what I want to see in them by speaking more slowly myself and encouraging them to do the same. Of course, I decided to make that into a game J So for one whole afternoon, the girls and I are going to talk extra ssssslllllooooowwwwwllllllyyyy and pay attention to how and what we are saying.
The girls mostly think that we are being silly be elongating everything we say. They also believe that slow speech needs to incorporate extra slow movement as well, so we plod slowly around that house all afternoon like cave woman. All week, as a result, I have noticed more words that the kids, mostly Abby, run together, like "Pick E Up" for "Pick Me Up" and I have repeated what she should have said slowly to her and asked her to try to say it. In every case so far she's been able to say it slowly after me, but has reverted when she says it quickly. Rome wasn't built in a day, so I just repeat the corrected version again and have her say it again. Eventually I think that it will stick.
Another suggestion that I got from Teresa was to change words in songs or nursery rhymes to see if the kids can hear the difference in the sounds. We did that once before in February (Learning to Listen Blog).
3. Develop mouth muscles
I also read that one thing that shapes a child’s ability to speak well is the development of their mouth’s muscles. Of the many ways to do this, I decided to do three throughout the course of the week:
1) Blowing bubbles
Forming and holding the proper shape in your lips helps develop the mouth muscles you need to speak properly. As Abby learned, if you get enough of the bubble stuff in your mouth you can blow bubbles without the bubble wand. I hope that stuff doesn’t make her sick!
2) Playing instruments
The kids love to play paper towel rolls as different instruments. Briana is into the tuba right now for some reason so we pretended we had tubas and played the paper towel rolls. The kids also play the princess whistle, the toy flutes, and my clarinet quite often for fun.
3) Making funny faces
It’s all too easy to talk the kids into making funny faces with me. We all have a great time…especially when different funny faces come with different sound effects. The girls are quite good at matching my silly faces and coming up with their own. Good, silly fun for midday on Sunday.
If you see the kids around, strike up a conversation. They already love to talk, as anyone who knows them can attest, and now they have some new tools to help them be even more understandable. Here’s to hoping that they don’t use those skills to talk my ears off.
<3 Pedigreed Housewife
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