Speech Therapy Home Exercises

If you have a child who participates in speech therapy at school, you should continue the work when he is at home or on summer vacation. As a parent, you should foster good articulation by finding exercises and games that your child can do at home to exercise his mouth and continue the work that he started at school.

Speech Card Games

• Using a deck of flash cards that have pictures and words identifying your child's favorite characters or animals can be an effective way to teach articulation while doing speech therapy. Play a memory game in which you choose a card at random, have your child say it and remember it, and then shuffle it back in the deck. Your child then begins looking for the memory card by going through all the other cards, saying the word on each card she pulls out until finding the memory card again.

  You may also have your child pick a card at random and then have her use it in a sentence.

Shooting Game

• This game combines fun with speech therapy and can be done in your own home. First, purchase a toy gun that shoots suction cups. Then make cards with words that your child has trouble with, such as words with "s" sounds or hard "c" sounds. Laminate the cards and hang them around the room. Your child plays the game by saying the word that he's aiming for and then shooting the suction cup at it. If he hits another word instead, he has to say that word. He will love shooting the toy gun so much that he probably won't notice that you are doing speech therapy with him.

Speech Collage

• You can incorporate speech therapy with an art project by making a speech collage. First, identify and write down the speech sounds you want your child to work on. Choose a few sounds that she has trouble with and a few that she's very comfortable with in order to build her confidence. Look through magazines for words with the speech sounds that you've chosen. Cut those words out, and when you're done, give them to your child with a glue stick and have her make a collage. Each day, the child can look at her collage and sound out some of the words she has trouble with.

Instrumental Therapy

• Having your child use his mouth to play an instrument gives him important oral therapy that he needs to properly form words with his mouth. Purchase a harmonica, recorder or even a small kazoo so that he can have fun while exercising his mouth to form certain words and sounds. This is an effective exercise to do before working on some more challenging words and phrases.