Fluency and Voice Activities
Here are some activities that you can do at home to improve your child's fluency and voice skills:
All of these activites can be altered to address voice skills. For each activity, have your child use their good voice skills when talking, like using appropriate loudness and pitch levels.
- Have your child name 3 strategies he/she uses to improve the fluency of his/her speech. For example, taking breaths at the beginning or middle of sentences, slow starts, "stretchy speech", thinking about the sentence before starting to say it, etc.
- Have your child make up a sentence about school and then say it with "bumpy" speech and then "slow, easy" speech.
- Have your child make up 3 sentences about his/her favorite movie, best friend, new classroom and say it using slow, easy speech.
- Find a good book. Read for one minute or one page using slow, easy speech.
- Have your child ask you five questions about when you were his/her age using slow, easy speech.
- Have your child tell a joke using slow, easy speech.
- Have your child describe a room in your house or in his school using slow, easy speech.
- There is an easy activity you can do at home to help your child carryover their fluency skills. You start off by giving your child 5 tokens (you can use pennies, buttons, chips, etc.). You and your child can talk about anything you want. Explain to your child that if he/she has all 5 tokens by the end of conversation, he/she will get some type of reward. Tell your child that you will be taking tokens away if he/she forgets to use their fluency strategies, but you will also be rewarding them by returning tokens if they remember to use them in tough speech situations (ex: a sentence that has a difficult word or talking about something they are very excited about). I would generally try to have the child end up with all 5 tokens at the end so they get their reward. This is a great activity to help your child develop self-awareness about their fluency skills.
- Have your child describe his/her favorite movie or tv show.
- Have your child talk about his/her favorite holiday.
- Have your child tell about things he/she did at school that day.
All of these activites can be altered to address voice skills. For each activity, have your child use their good voice skills when talking, like using appropriate loudness and pitch levels.