Speech Sounds

Teaching speech sounds is part of the approach taken in the development of Communication and Literacy skills at Oaklands. Children’s speech sound difficulties can have an impact on their ability to make themselves understood and on the development of reading and writing skills. We have worked closely with the Speech and Language Therapists (SaLT) who work at Oaklands to plan and teach the sounds to support each child to hear, distinguish and try to articulate them. This forms important stepping stones for verbal communication, learning phonics skills, reading & writing. The speech sound sessions use cued articulation techniques and are a regular part of the curriculum in Nurture & Willow pathway classes. One letter sound will be focused on at a time, and taught 3-4 times during the week. Speech sounds can be taught alongside phonics or be replaced by formal phonics sessions, dependent on pupils' needs.

Cued articulation is a set of hand cues for teaching individual sounds in words.

• Each hand movement represents one sound and the cue give clues as to how and where the sound is produced.

• It represents sounds visually to support auditory information.

Main Features:

• Place – where in our mouth we make the sound and this is shown in the shape and placement of the hand.

• Manner – how the sound is made and this is shown in the movement of the hand.

• Voicing – is it voiced (noisy sound) or voiceless (quiet sound) which is shown by the number of fingers.

Watch the short video clips to see our teachers present the speech sounds using cued articulation. Encourage your child to watch, listen and copy both the sound and the hand movement.