Getting Your Child's Talking Tool Moving

Often when children are beginning to talk they are not aware of their tongue and lips and how they can move them. Lips need to move at different speeds and directions for us to produce specific sounds. The tongue also plays an important role in eating and producing sounds in speech.

Practice is the key to mastering anything successfully, try these ideas at home with your little one to help get their talking tool moving and have some fun at the same time!

Ideas to Encourage Tongue Movement

• Look in the mirror and encourage your child to pull faces using their tongue.
• Spread your child’s favourite spread (Vegemite, Peanut Butter, etc), around the outside of their mouth and encourage them to lick it off.
• Place a thin layer of tomato sauce on a plastic plate and encourage your child to lick it clean.
• Encourage different ways of singing – ‘la, la, la’ or ‘lol, lol, lol’, ‘le, le, le’, use different syllables to create variety.
• Lick lollies, ice blocks and envelopes.
• Use a mirror and encourage copying.
• Poem and Game -“Pinky Tongue” (great in front of a mirror - see below).
  
  Pinky tongue though he might come out and have some fun. (stick tongue out)
  First he looked high (point tongue out and up)
  And then he looked low (point tongue out and down)
  To the left and right, then to and fro (tongue moving sideways back and forward)
  And then I heard him softly blow “th” (or another sound that you may be working on).

Ideas to Encourage Lip Movement

• Encourage your child to place their lips together. Put lipstick on their top lip and encourage your child to print it onto their bottom lip.
• Encourage your child to look at their smile in the mirror. Try a big smile, a little smile, a smile that shows teeth, etc.
• Make ‘fish faces’ by pursing your lips together.
• Blow ‘raspberries’.
• Kissing onto paper with lipstick to make prints, kissing dolls and teddies.
• Blowing cotton wool balls along a table.
• To blow out the candles on the cake.

Remember that if you have any concerns about your child’s language skills or speech development, consult your local GP or Paediatrician. The earlier you seek assistance for your little one the better.