Car slides are essential to every household with a toddler. It's easy to play, self-explanatory and children love watching cars slide down all day.

All the tips and tricks we talk about here is what we use at our clinic on a daily basis. This what we cover:

1. General suggestions - 0:00
2. Teaching "Open" - 01:02
3. Play sequence - 01:59
4. Open palm gesture - 02:44
5. Guessing game - 02:54
6. 1,2,3 GO! - 03:23
7. Teaching words - 04:01
8. Answering questions - 04:54
9. Keeping it fun and more questions- 05:39
10. Free Checklist - 07:41

Having a strong sequence or routine for a toy is very important. You have to be careful not to allow your child to access all the cars in one go. So that you can slowly level up the fun.

Then by adding different objects or other cars and transportation, you can actually start to slide things that might not be appropriate for the slide and teach some basic "what's wrong" and logical thinking. Thank you for watching! Please like this video and share it with friends who need...

Mr potato head is one of the best toys to get your child talking, but you need to know how to use it. In this video, we cover easy to difficult language goals that you can target.

1. Intro - 0:00
2. Receptive Language (introducing the toy) - 0:32
3. Action imitation - 2:32
4. Sound imitation - 4:26
5. Saying words - 5:40
6. Answering simple questions- 7:38
7. Answering why questions - 10:33
8. Sequence description - 11:37
9. Storytelling - 12:53

Download our sequencing picture examples here

The Mr. Potato Head set I use: https://amzn.to/3ksYZz9 (I use 2 sets usually, and this is an affiliate link!)

Key to learning any skill is repetition

We learn nearly everything through repetition. Whenever we do something over and over again, we provide ourselves with feedback and more knowledge about how something should be done. That’s why even a single task or a way of communication should be repeated many times until you go onto the next thing. You need to set up a routine so that you give your child ample chances for practicing, even if it’s something really simple like an open palm gesture.

Quality beats quantity

Although we love repetition, it needs to be good quality repetitions. If you keep on doing something with bad form, you’ll get injured. Similarly in speech therapy, by going in short bursts of high-quality training, you can help your child get to the objective much faster than dragging it on and on. The key really is to be consistent. 5-10 minutes every day of high-quality training goes a long way and sets a good habit for training.

Backward chaining

To...

Fun Routines

When we give a child a toy, we cannot assume that he will know how to play it. As we’ve previously suggested in another video https://youtu.be/g3iMyY-1GTs, we should be creating fun routines to engage our children and also to teach them how to actually play with a toy or with us.

Voice and sound effects

By adding sound effects and funny voices to our play, it will help your child to engage and care about whatever that you’re trying to make them do. Even if it’s a cool toy, without your guidance and playfulness, you cannot “sell” the toy effectively.

Pairing it with good stuff

Sometimes you have to teach play like a task. What we’ve been doing is to pair the stuff that your child likes to things that he hasn’t learned how to play with yet. So you might want to look into systematically teaching your child to play, do it as a task and reward with snacks, drinks, and anything that is motivating.

Don’t over exaggerate mouth shapes

If you’re teaching certain speech sounds and are exaggerating your mouth shape to get your child to either look at you or make it easier for your child to speak clearly, then you should consider stopping what you’re doing.

The reason is that if you’re able to teach your child to say a certain sound with an exaggerated mouth shape, for example, the /f/ sound is a popular sound that gets exaggerated a lot. Then your child might have difficulties saying a word, a sentence with an exaggerated /f/ mouth shape! It’s because it’s much harder to coordinate, their mouths have to move so much more than they should to get the sound right!

Speak slowly and clearly
Many of the times we are guilty of overwhelming someone who doesn’t speak our language by talking too fast. I certainly am a victim of this in foreign countries. Your child needs to be able to identify what sounds and words you’re talking in order to...

Teach a gesture first
Yes, that’s correct. The function of calling mama is to ask for help, ask for food and water, and also for attention and affection. But sometimes “mama” might be too far down the road. So we should teach your delayed child to tap on to you. You can teach the tapping to be on your shoulder, arm, hand, thigh, or anywhere appropriate.

Keep on saying it yourself in the right context
When you teach the gesture, you have to provide the correct language structure at the correct time, place, and context. By saying it over and over again when the tapping happens, you’re teaching your child to call for you in the future.

Provide chances to repeat
Do a task that requires your attention and help multiple times in a short period of time. This might be the child asking for a piece of the puzzle, food, or anything that he needs your help to have fun. By repeating many times, it makes it easier for your child to learn to say, mama. It’s a matter of...

HUGE disclaimer: I am not saying that diagnoses are useless. It’s very helpful for professionals. What I mean when I say “diagnosis isn’t important” - I mean it’s not important for the parent at this moment in time. See a professional who you trust!

Start teaching your child at home. Download my FREE home therapy checklist→ https://www.agentsofspeech.com/checklist

If you are reading this, it’s because you’ve been searching for it. Leave it to the professionals, I know it’s difficult to come to terms with it. But focus on what you can do right now! If it helps, use the “I’ll prove them wrong” mentality to help push you and your child to make consistent

What is speech and language delay and ASD
Speech and language disorder can be summarized when a child lacks in his ability to communicate effectively as compared to peers of the same age group. Whereas Autism Spectrum disorder, I’d urge you to read the...

Why playing?

Playing is an essential skill for how children learn about the world and following rules. Cognitive ability in a toddler is correlated with his play skills. It also gives the context needed to teach language, and essential prelinguistic skills.

My favourite games

Games are strong routines that are fun and engaging. It can help bridge that gap between being socially aloof and a child who laughs so loud that’d hurt your ears.

• Peekaboo
• Tickling
• Swinging hands
• Jumping
• Upside Down
• Falling
• Singing songs with movements
• Turn-taking games (bubbles, balls, cars, microphones)

You see these activities don't need a whole lot of toys, rather, you become the toy and have a great time with your child.

You become a social reinforcement to your child, teaching him that it’s actually fun to play with you. 

Adding language to games

Once your child knows the routine and tries to initiate playing with you. You can teach the words associated with it....

If your speech and language delayed child is using “I want _____” or “Give me ____” to request for items and doesn’t seem to be able to use other ways of communicating then this video is for you.

Most of the time why these “frozen phrases” happen, is because there isn’t a chance to actually use other forms of language when speaking with you. When doing therapy, we do use a lot of rewards to ask children to do something for us. But we rarely teach different language functions other than requesting. 

There are many more language functions you can target, for instance, commenting, rejecting, requesting, asking for permission, asking for clarification, and so on… So teach him how to use these functions in your training instead!

The other problem is actually generalization, even if you teach other ways to use language, if it’s only during structured training, it’s not going to help your child to...

Is your child leaving out the last sound of a word? This is what we call the final consonant deletion. To treat it yourself isn’t too difficult, but first, we need to answer some questions.

Does your child do this for all final consonants? For example, the /m/ in “home” and the /s/ in “hose”. If the ending sound is deleted in both words, they would sound pretty much the same. So what sounds are missing? 

Of course, the best recommendation we can give is of course to see a qualified speech therapist if you can. Then you will know exactly what sounds are missing and why it is missing. 

Once you know what sounds are missing, are these sounds available when you ask your child to produce it? For example, if a /s/ sound is missing, can he say “sssss” by himself? Saying a sound by itself is what we call isolation level. Make sure your child can do these sounds at isolation level, if not you should teach the sound...