The Wordmaker

In the midst, of the shelter in place orders, a family I see for auditory verbal therapy sent me a fascinating book. King Moo the Woodmaker by Pers Crowell ©1976. Dad had a copy when he was young. Mom loves how it draws a parallel to the Learning To Listen Sounds and spoken language. Have you read this book?

King Moo, a primitive man makes words from the sounds of animals and nature and teaches the words to his tribe. S-S -s-s-s for the snake; Ow-w--Wow-W--Wow-w for the dog; M-M-m-oo-oo-oo" for the bull and more. "He wanted sounds to tell others when he felt well, or when he felt bad. He wanted to be able to tell then what he wanted...."

Each time Moo made a new word he taught the other cavemen what it meant and showed them how to make it with their tongue and lips and teeth. The story tells that Moo became the first person to invent words, have a name and become the first king, King Moo.

Listen, Search and Find - Auditory Memory and Comprehension Resource

Listen, Search and Find is an auditory memory and comprehension resource that features interactive listening and spoken language activities for auditory learning and practice. 

The is a huge 124 page resource that has four decks with navigation that moves from page to page with clickable pictures. The object is to listen, recall, comprehend, search and find the picture on each game slide from a large closed set of 50 items.

The interactive PDFs keep listeners active and engaged. This resource works great for screen sharing on a computer in teletherapy and played face to face on a computer, tablet or a smartboard. It is easily printed and played in person with no technology.

‍DECK 1: Auditory Closure is completing a short cloze passage presented auditorily. The goal is for the listener to complete the sentences by filling in the missing words. This targets auditory association, discrimination, word retrieval and long and short term memory skills. 

Example: The black widow spider is spinning a _________. Web

DECK 2: Auditory Integration involves recalling keywords presented auditorily. The goal is to identify keywords in each sentence. The listener processes information read aloud then answers a question about the sentence.

Example: Rabbits are fast and turtles are slow. What animal is slow? Turtle

‍DECK 3: Auditory Directions involves following a series of verbal directives presented auditorily. The goal is to listen to multi-step commands then perform each task in order.

Example: Blink your eyes 3 times, find the igloo then pretend to shiver. Igloo

‍DECK 4: Listen For Inferences is drawing logical conclusions based on 4-part riddles presented auditorily. The goal is to make logical guesses and identify pictures by listening to four clues. Each of the clues is increasingly more specific.

Example: I am alive. I am often green but some change colors. I am a flat part of a plant. I grow. —Leaf

This is an auditory resource therefore written prompts do not appear on the slides where they can be read by the player. The therapist, teacher or parent reads the prompts and there is space allocated for data collection with the criteria based on the child’s individual goals

What is Speech Tracking?

Speech Tracking is an Auditory-Verbal Technique used for improving listening and spoken language skills. It is a process in which the child is asked to repeat verbatim or word for word a story which is read aloud.

How to Speech Track?

1. The parent or Auditory–Verbal Therapist reads a passage to the child and they repeat exactly what was heard.

2. The information is presented through listening alone. 

3. After the child tracks then they are reinforced by seeing the illustrations.

Why Is Speech Tracking Effective? 

Children learn to talk by saying what we hear and hearing what we say. This is the natural way children learn the language of their family. Speech tracking incorporates the child’s Auditory-Feedback Loop to self-monitor his/her speech and spoken language.

www. AuditoryVerbalTherapy.net

Children who are deaf or hard of hearing with natural-sounding speech have developed this by using their Auditory Feedback Loop by listening rather than looking. Too much emphasis on visual cues most often leads to unnatural sounding vocal pitch, melody, volume and exaggerated speech patterns. It is impossible to lip-read or learn natural suprasegmentals of speech through vision. Hearing not vision conveys this information.

Tips to Begin Speech Tracking

MATERIALS: The material you select should be within your child’s language level, an interesting topic or story to hold your child’s attention. If it is too easy your child will be able to guess at the words s/he misses auditorily. If the language level is too high, your child will become frustrated and want to give up.

Storybooks are most commonly used but a child’s homework reading can also be included as well as personal stories told about the child’s own experiences. Attentive listening and remembering are easy when children begin to look forward to speech tracking at bedtime. Many of my AV families speech track one book and then Mom or Dad reads the other nighttime stories.

TARGETS: You may be surprised how many fine errors your child makes that you do not notice in ongoing conversations. Use acoustic highlighting techniques to correct fine discrimination and thus production errors. These errors are often in unstressed words or morphology, those that are uttered quickly and tend to be concentrated at the high-frequency end of the speech spectrum. 

For example:

· Articles such as: the vs. a

· Grammar such as have vs. has

· Pronouns such as he vs. she

· Prepositions such as is and are

· Contractions such as can vs. can’t

· Plurals |s|, |z|, and |es| 

· Possessives |s|

· Past tense verb forms ending in |d|, |t|, and |ed| and irregular forms such as "fall/fell" which differ only by an embedded vowel. 

When your child misses part of the word, phrase or sentence, simply repeat it. If your child continues to miss it try a shorter phrase, slow down, or alter your pitch. You can emphasize keywords or unaccentuated words.

If you want to keep track of your child’s progress, Speech tracking can be scored in the number of words correctly repeated per minute. You may want to do this once a month to see progress over time.

Note: Speech Tracking is very effective for children with Auditory Processing Disorders who have some of the same spoken language needs. 

Lisening and Spoken Language Games on Sale

I’m having a sale on two of my most popular Listening and SpokenLanguage games.

🐝 BUZZ OFF- Vocabulary Builder 5 Games in 1

❓GUESS MY SECRET OBJECT - Critical Thinking & Reasoning 

25b% off by using the promo code THANKYOU20 at checkout!

Encouraging A Sense of Humor - Joke of the Week

A child’s ability to understand humor is evidence of growing listening, spoken language, and social skills. Many children who are deaf and hard of hearing are concrete thinkers and lack linguistic flexibility which has a negative impact on literacy, academic and social success. Research offers evidence of the value of understanding humor as a key element in developing higher-level language skills and complex language patterns such as inferences, multiple-meaning words, and idioms which are often weak for children with hearing loss without intervention.

Understanding jokes and why they are funny builds vocabulary, figurative language, and knowledge of structural and lexical ambiguity. Learning to tell jokes encourages clear speech, appropriate prosody as well as perspective-taking and social skills. Memorizing jokes to tell improves auditory memory skills.

Talk about different kinds of jokes. Jokes that ask a question with a “punch line” that makes people laugh. Knock - Knock jokes have two parts and are usually funny because one word sounds similar or rhymes with a different word. Ask a child to explain why a joke is funny. If not many bluff and laugh without understanding.

When learning how to reply and tell jokes a script is helpful.  “I have a joke for you.” introduces the topic of conversation.  Explaining that jokes are not logical and the answers are tricky is important. Teaching the child to respond with “I don’t know. I give up.” works well.

Child: I have a joke for you.
Adult: Ok. I’m ready.
Child: What is a dog’s favorite snack?
Adult: I don’t know. I give up.
Child: Pup-corn! LOL!

In my auditory verbal practice, children often age 5-7 come prepared with a joke to share. They draw a picture of the joke on one side of a piece of paper and the answer goes on the back often written by a parent.

Monthly and seasonal Riddles & Jokes are available for FREE in my Listen With Lynn shop. Share them in teletherapy, distance-learning or send home for fun and practice. They can be printed cut out and adhered to index cards for easy re-telling.