I’ve noticed that my 2 year old has a few struggles with his speech. But what 2 year old doesn’t? I don’t think his is abnormally behind others his age but still I would like for him to learn how to communicate effectively and not develop bad habits. The main thing that I’ve noticed is the omittance of sounds in his speech. If it’s too hard for him to pronounce then he will just leave it out of the word. There are some occasions that he will substitute one sound for another. For an example the “sl” sound is very difficult for him to pronounce so he will substitute it for an “f” sound, such as “fide” instead of “slide”.
My mother in love (who is called “Dammie” instead of “Grammie”) brought up to me that maybe he is trying to speak as fast as he is thinking and it turns into jibber jabber. That made sense to me because he will really want to communicate something then start speaking really fast and omit a lot of sounds making it hard to understand what he is saying. I don’t think it’s a matter of him not understanding because he seems to understand what I tell him, reword or explain what he is trying to say, and make a few signs that he learned.
My husband and I try not to baby talk to our child. We hope that by speaking normally to him, he will mimic us and speak clearly back. Of course we do still say cute little sayings because he’s our baby and only 2, but we try not to change our voices when we say them.
I went to Adventures in Learning earlier this month and purchased a phonics sing along CD. He really enjoys listening to the CD although he hasn’t done much singing along yet. I try to make up fun ways to learn sounds without frustrating him. Correcting him can sometimes be a little too overwhelming for him at this point. I have been saying “look at mommy’s mouth” and say the sound a few times, but sometimes even that makes him cry. Maybe he thinks he’s in trouble because when he does something bad and I give him a talking to, I say “look at mommy’s eyes”.
When we are having fun playing, I try to teach him then because that seems to be the most effective and never frustrating because he doesn’t realize that I’m trying to teach him a new sound. If daddy and I talk to him a lot and read to him every day I’m hoping that he will pick up the sounds that he is omitting.
Like daddy, he is very drawn to electronics. He loves to play on daddy’s ipad or mommy’s iphone. The touch screens are very easy for him to use and interact with as opposed to a mouse and keyboard. Daddy has purchased several apps on his ipad for him. I think his favorite is fish school where he learned matching and counting. He also likes a spider game where daddy and I recorded our voices singing the itsy bitsy spider. I recently uploaded an app on my phone called starfall abc’s that teaches early phonics. I believe it was $2.99 and it has been a life saver already. Today we had to wait about an hour at the doctor’s and we played starfall the whole time.
One other thing that he does is not say “hi” to people in public that say “hi” to him, but just totally ignore the person. This however has nothing to do with his speech and I’ll just stop there before I rabbit trail too much.
If you have any ideas or thoughts on early phonics or toddler’s speech, please feel free to share. Thanks!
