Developing speech sounds

Children are able to produce English speech sounds relatively early, and almost all speech sounds can be produced by the age of 8. This chart shows when speech sounds are acquired.

Children often have difficulties saying words where there is more than one consonant together, e.g. small, spoon, train, string and plane.

Diagram showing the letters that children find most difficult at various ages.

How you can help

Some simple do's and don'ts

DO

DON'T
Model the correct sounds to your child

Correct the child as this gives them an incorrect model of the word that they are learning. Example:

Child: 'Look at the dod.'

Adult: 'You don't say dod. You say dog.'
Use slow and clear speech

Avoid breaking the word up as it sounds unnatural. Example:

Child: 'Pease can I have one?'

Adult: 'You mean puh-lease, puh-lease may I have one?'

Try and give as many examples of the target sound as possible. Example:

Child: 'Look at the tat.'

Adult: 'Yes, it is a cat, a big cat, what do you think the cat is called?'

  

Games and activities to develop sounds

Sing nursery rhymes and develop rhyming skills together

Read books that contain rhymes and point out the rhyming words. Sing nursery rhymes, such as ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’.
Ask your child to identify words that rhyme, for example ‘cat’ and ‘hat’. Once your child is able to do this encourage your child to think of rhyming words, for example asking them, ‘What rhymes with cat?’.

Listening games for specific sounds

Select one sound and try the following activities:

  • Find objects beginning with the sound.
  • Look for pictures in books that begin with the target sound.
  • Choose stories with lots of repetition of the sound e.g.’fee-fi-fo-fum’.
  • Place objects that begin with the target sound into a bag - encourage your child to feel each object without looking and ask them to guess what it is.
  • Draw pictures of objects beginning with the sound and ask the child to colour them in.

Copying games

  • Encourage your child to copy sounds that you make. Start by copying funny faces, such as poking your tongue out or puffing your cheeks up.
  • Try different sounds, such as ‘eee’, ‘shhhh’, ‘p’, ‘ffffff’.
  • Try putting sounds together, for example, ‘p b p b p b’ or ‘sh e sh e sh e’.

Develop sentance awareness

Say sentences with your child and clap/jump for each word e.g. ‘The big dinosaur’.

Develop syllable awareness

Pick out items in the house and clap/jump the number of syllables in the word, e.g. por – ridge, bi –cy –cle.
If you have concerns about your child’s talking please visit the speech and language drop-in for pre-school children.

Download a copy of our Developing Speech Sounds leaflet here:  Developing Speech Sounds.pdf [pdf] 398KB