Children

Program Description

Sound Foundation for Children is the third in a series of resources designed to guide parents in helping their children who are continuing to develop their listening and speech skills. You and your family can use this program which is designed for children 36 to 48 months of age. Fun weekly activities are designed for you to use in and around your home to reinforce your child’s core learning areas of audition, receptive language, expressive language and speech. We also provide a suggestion for a song and book of the week that helps your child meet the weekly goals in a fun activity. You will find hundreds of games, activities and ideas to support you in working with your child’s spoken language. This program provides you with guidance in developing your children’s' spoken language through listening. We hope you find the activities engaging as they are designed to fit easily into everyday life as well as provide the knowledge and understanding of the theory behind the goals identified each week.

Program Sample

Here is a sample of the Sound Foundation for Children program. Use this sample to test out the program. In this activity you will focus on your child’s ability to remember and process 3 descriptions. This game enforces auditory memory and sequencing.

Activity: Farm Animals

Start with a set of farm animals that is familiar to your child. Before you bring an animal into your child’s visual field, describe it using three descriptions specific to that animal. You might talk about:

• size relative to other animals (It’s bigger than a dog.)
• what it likes to eat (It likes to eat oats and carrots.)
• what it does or what you can do with it (You can put a saddle on it and ride it.)
• a part of the animal (It has hooves.)
• the sound it makes (It says, ‘neigh.’)

Give the sound it makes as the last cue, since your child likely will guess the animal when he/she hears the sound it makes. Bring out the toy horse when your child identifies ‘horse.’

Note: If your child tries to identify after the first clue, have them wait for at least two or three clues otherwise it is just a guess. If he/she gets the answer right after the first two clues, your clues are probably too easy. Once you have four to six different toy animals out, line them up and tell your child to look at them and try to remember each animal. Tell your child to close their eyes or cover the animals and then take one away. Tell your child to open his/her eyes and ask, ‘What’s missing?’ Once your child gets very good at this game you can increase the number of animals you take away.