Byford Speech & Language

18/04/2024

Our newest addition - Sarah and Emma!

Puppets provide an engaging way to teach children about the rules of conversation and grammar, aid articulation of sounds, and illustrate language and literacy concepts.

Children love to have ‘conversations’ with a puppet. Each verbal interaction with their puppet will encourage language development. Children who are generally shy really benefit from the opportunity to let the puppet be their voice.

Can’t wait to use them with our little friends.

03/12/2023

09/11/2023

Play is one of the most important ways that children learn about the world. It helps them learn new skills, build language and relate to the world around them. Some of the types of play your child will use include:

1️⃣ Functional play: where your child explores different toys and objects to see exactly what they do, and starts to play with the toy for its intended function (e.g. bouncing a ball, stacking blocks, pushing a car). Functional play starts to develop around 12-18 months. 🏀🚗🧱

2️⃣ Symbolic play: your child starts to use one object to represent another object (e.g. using a toy banana as a telephone or a cardboard box as a house). Symbolic play starts to develop between 18-24 months. 🍌📦

3️⃣ Imaginitive play: your child starts to act out familiar routines or something that seems interesting to them (e.g. feeding a doll, playing doctor). Imaginitive play starts to develop around 24-36 months. 🍼🧸🩺

05/11/2023

Bilingualism

Is my child getting confused?

Bilingual infants readily distinguish their two languages and show no evidence of confusion. Infants are also sensitive to these perceptual differences, and are particularly attuned to a language’s rhythm.

One misunderstood behaviour, which is often taken as evidence for confusion, is when bilingual children mix words from two languages in the same sentence.

This is known as code-mixing and is a normal part of bilingual development.

01/11/2023

This pyramid shows the building blocks of language development. Children need to develop skills in each of the different areas shown in order to communicate.

Each area of the pyramid has its own order of development and so the skills which children have are dependent on their age.

Each layer of the pyramid also supports the development of the layer above it. If a child has not developed a lower layer as expected, they will often have difficulty developing the layers above.

For example, some children have difficulty with attention and listening skills. This is the very bottom layer of the pyramid and so difficulties in this area will affect all the skills above it.