Speech and language
Talking and Listening are crucial skills for following instructions, maintaining attention, demonstrating appropriate behaviour, expressing wants and needs, learning to read, write and spell, and for social interactions with others.
Children who struggle with talking and listening can have difficulties with:
- Talking clearly (so that strangers can understand them)
- Expressing their needs
- Finding the right words to use
- Using sentences that are appropriate for their age instead using “jumbled’ sentences
This may lead to frustration as they fail to make themselves understood; they might over rely on gestures or use jumbled up or age inappropriate sentence structures to communicate or even stop communicating at all.
A child with Listening difficulties might not
- Understand what others are asking them or telling them
- Answer questions
- Follow directions
- Understandstories
- Play with peers
This might result in the child appearing to ignore others, needing lots of repetition of instructions, looking to others to know what to do and playing next to their peers instead of playing with them.
How RISE can help:
Our Speech Therapists can directly help children develop these crucial skills. Speech Therapy addresses the functional skills that are required across different environments. While the actual ‘therapy’ occurs within the clinic, our Speech Therapy team works closely with parents, teachers and other care-givers to implement strategies to develop language and play skills in the home, child care, kindergarten and school environments.
