On Friday, Joel and I attended a session hosted by the SLP at Jonah's preschool. Although much of her presentation was old news for us, I found one thing very helpful. I wanted to share it with all of you.

Her point with the following is that the English language has a set of rules when we speak. Not only how to sound out each letter (or their multiple sounds!), but also how to blend one sound with the next. For the average person, we don't even think about it. With a child that has a delay such as Jonah's, their brain has chosen to rebel and make their own rules. So, we need to retrain it and teach it the correct sounds for each letter. For Jonah, his brain rebelled multiple times.

Try this exercise and you'll get a small taste of Jonah's daily struggles (the specific sound substitution shown is one Jonah does use, but he has several others, primarily in the initial position). I think my brain would hurt at the end of the day too.


Try switching all of your "s" sounds to "t" sounds.

"see" becomes "tee" (initial postion)
"nice" becomes ________ (final postion) answer: night
"icy" becomes _________ (medial postion) answer : eye-ty

How would you say "spicy"? (blend)

How would you say:
Someone saw the purse snatcher as soon as the smoke had disappeared.

Go on....try it out loud. Takes awhile, doesn't it?
So keep praying for and encouraging him! He's doing better each week, but he's hit some bumps in the road this last week or two and I can now understand why.