Supporting speech and language at home

Hi I am Laura Black and I am Charmaine Tearle and we’re speech and language therapists. We both run April cottage therapies and we’ve created some top tips on how to support your child’s communication.

Lots of parents ask us about how they can support their children’s speech and language development at home. So we’ve come up with an easy to remember acronym that helps you remember four really useful strategies.

So these spell out the word H.O.ME.

So the first one is H for Have FUN. So we know that when children are relaxed and having fun, that they’re going to be engaged and attending to you as a parent, um, where we can help them to learn speech and language, um, and different vocabulary

O stands for for OVER and OVER. Children have to hear words, lots and lots of times for them to be able to understand exactly what that word means and for them to then be able to use it in the appropriate context.

So the next letter is M and that stands for MIRRORING. So when we’re trying to help children to learn to have conversations, this starts from really early on. So it might be that we want to mirror or copy their sounds. Their babbling sounds that actions. Um, and this is the really early foundations of conversational skills to teach our children.

The last one E stands for EXTEND. And again, early on extending children’s communication as infants might just look like, um, interpreted and extending gestures or noises that they are saying. So if they pointed and said, ah, we might interpret that for them and extend up. You want me to pick you up?

Later on, when children are around the age of two, we might want to help them extend the number of words that they say together and put two word phrases together. So if they said something like car, we could say, oh yes, a big car or blue car, or the cars driving.

So these four letters that spell out a H.O.M.E. make up the foundations of our course that you can find on our bloss profile page.

The Chatty chops course is perfect for late talkers and children age between 12 and 36 months. And it gives you lots more strategies that you can use at home to support your child’s communication.