Often times parents hear that their school-age child is making progress in speech therapy, but do not see the progress at home. Although the child is able to produce their targeted speech sound in isolation, they may not be able to carry those skills over into real life conversations.Cognitive learning examples for example, your child might be able to correctly say “parachute” and “red” when asked to produce only those words, but when telling you a story the “w” substitution still persists.Cognitive learning examples the topic of your child’s story has become the “wed pawachute.”

Generalizing speech skills to conversation and across settings is the last big hurdle for your child and the older they are, the more difficult it may be.Cognitive learning examples it is always best practice to inform a child about their target sounds and therapy goals. It provides the child with a sense of purpose and helps them take ownership of their speech.Cognitive learning examples however, if the child is approximately seven years old or younger and they are being provided with opportunities for repetition and review of their strategies on a consistent basis, you will probably see these skills start to “magically” emerge in their every day speech without a lot of emphasis being made on thinking about their sounds.Cognitive learning examples on the other hand, once children get past a certain age (around seven or eight years old), it is imperative that they are taught and practice the metacognitive skills needed for speech generalization.Cognitive learning examples

Cognitive thought is what we’re actually thinking about to perform a task. So, in speech therapy that might look like a child thinking, “to make the /s/ sound I need to place my tongue behind my teeth and direct a skinny stream of air through the center of my teeth.” metacognitive thought is when we think about what we’re doing to monitor and correct the outcome.Cognitive learning examples for instance, a child may be practicing their targeted /s/ sound when their tongue begins to flatten and pull away from their teeth. The child then thinks, “my tongue is too flat and not in the right spot to produce a correct /s/.” this ability to monitor and correct is the cornerstone to speech articulation carry over.Cognitive learning examples

There are several ways to target this skill in therapy. First, let the child know that they will be learning how to be their own speech therapist.Cognitive learning examples I let my students know from the start that I do not have an X-ray machine or a mouth fairy that can see what is going on inside their mouths, so they have to be aware of what their articulators are doing at all times.Cognitive learning examples for children to be able to successfully identify and describe what is going on inside their own mouths, they need to be given a brief anatomy lesson.Cognitive learning examples the university of iowa has a great website that provides a wonderful visual tool for this purpose.

Once the child understands how the parts of the mouth work together to correctly produce a sound, work on some metacognition by comparing and contrasting.Cognitive learning examples explain how their articulators are moving in relationship to one another when they incorrectly produce the sound. Compare and contrast the correct and incorrect movements/productions.Cognitive learning examples then compare and contrast the sound quality of correct and incorrect productions. For example, does the /s/ sound skinny and crisp or wide and slushy?Cognitive learning examples let the child tell you what’s going on in their mouth. This helps the child begin self monitoring from the very first stages of therapy so as they progress, thinking about their muscle movements and quality of their productions is ingrained.Cognitive learning examples

As therapy progresses and the child begins practicing sounds at the word and phrase levels, allow them to rate their own accuracy. Use simple visual monitoring like a thumbs up/thumbs down system or a dry erase board to “keep score” of correct and incorrect productions.Cognitive learning examples when an incorrect production is detected, stop and discuss what went wrong inside the mouth and how it can be corrected. Remind the child that listening is just as important as talking when it comes to good speech.Cognitive learning examples

After the word and phrase level, most children move onto the sentence and conversation levels and that is when generalization and carryover of skills usually begin.Cognitive learning examples there are several different activities that can be done to promote carryover and generalization at this level that are very effective. However, if the child has been taught to use metacognitive thinking to self-monitor and self-correct their speech from the beginning, generalization and carryover will already be occurring naturally.Cognitive learning examples