Apraxia Therapy Materials: Turn & Talk Early Sounds

Therapy Materials Review: Turn & Talk Early Sounds - Fun Practice with P, B, M, T, D, and N in Initial, Medial, and Final Positions of Words

This is a review of Turn & Talk Early Sounds. This easel book is published by Super Duper Publications. The book contains 600 illustrated words addressing the early emerging phonemes (p, b, m, t, d, n) in initial, medial, and final positions of one and two syllable words.

Target Audience

The publishers state that the target audience for the Turn & Talk Early Sounds book will be children from PreK-3rd grade. The pictures on the cards are appealing to children. I could see using selected sections with younger children who need practice on early emerging sounds as well.

Description of Turn & Talk Early Sounds

This product is a 11 inch by 4.5 inch spiral bound book with hard covers. The book has a built in easel so you can stand it upright. Inside you'll find an introductory section describing the contents of the book and giving tips for eliciting correct production of the target sounds. This section also includes a blank card you can use to write in the sounds in isolation or in VC or CV syllables with a dry erase marker if you want to work on the sounds at that level.

Phonemic Breakdown

The book has a tabbed section for each of the six phonemes: P, B, M, T, D, N.

Each section includes 100 words divided as follows:

• 20 Initial One-Syllable
• 20 Initial Two-Syllable
• 20 Medial Two-Syllable
• 20 Final One-Syllable
• 20 Final Two-Syllable

How to Use the Turn & Talk Early Sounds book

This book is going to be most appropriate for intense drill on these phonemes. Choose the section that addresses your goals and objectives for a child and use that section to drill. The pictures are fairly engaging, but you will probably need some motivational tool such as a turn at a game, sticker, or token.

Pros and Cons of the Turn & Talk Early Sounds book

• Pros:
• The Turn & Talk Early Sounds book is compact and easy to carry around.
• AT 100 words per phoneme, the Turn & Talk Early Sounds book includes a pretty good number of stimuli per phoneme.
• The five picture spread format allows you to do many repetitions easily. This is a great format for approaching therapy with apraxic children from a motor planning standpoint.
  
• The book is sturdy and has a built in easel.
• The illustrations are well done and appealing to children at a wide variety of ages.
• Cons:
• Although there are 100 words per phoneme, there are only 20 one syllable initial and 20 one syllable final pictures for each phoneme. Most of those 20 one syllable words are fairly complex including later emerging phonemes, vocalic /r/ sounds, and even blends. Therefore, if you are working with a child with a severe speech delay you may find this book to include stimuli that is mostly too difficult. My free articulation picture cards target these same phonemes at a simpler motor planning level, so if you need simpler look there.
• This book will work best for children needing a simple articulation approach to speech remediation. Most children with simple articulation errors are making errors with later emerging phonemes. This book may not address the phonemes you need most.

Bottom Line:

The Turn & Talk Early Sounds book is a good purchase if you need stimuli that address these early emerging phonemes. Just think carefully about whether the stimuli included here are actually going to be too difficult given that often children who need drill on early emerging phonemes are severely delayed and may have difficulty producing many of these stimuli because of the other phonemes included in the target words.

You might also be interested in the following products:

Apraxia Therapy Materials: Free Speech Therapy Articulation Cards

Apraxia Therapy Materials: Webber Jumbo Articulation Drill Book

Apraxia Therapy Materials: Word Flips

Apraxia Therapy Materials: Phrase Flips

Making and Painting a Textured Surface

This started out as a great OT activity. Take toilet paper and let the children rip it into little bits and fill a bowl with it. They absolutely loved that part.

Then you add glue. Lots of glue. I didn't measure, but I used at least 8 oz for the three bowls. Ask the children to mix the glue with the toilet paper (with their hands) until it turns to sticky mush. Listen to screaming and crying protests and end up doing much of the mixing yourself. (Or at least, that's how it went at our house.)

[I forgot to take a picture of what the glue/toilet paper mush looked like. Sorry!]

Then persuade the children to take the mush from the bowl and put it on paper to dry creating textured paper before they run off to wash their hands. If you have children with no sensory issues, this has so much potential. I made a snowman. You could make a mountain and lake. You could make anything really. It's pretty cool.

Let it dry for a couple of days until you remember to get back to the project.

Let the children paint the newly textured paper. They loved this part. I filled an ice cube tray with six different colors of liquid tempera paints and gave them brushes and let them paint. We experimented with dabbing it on the textured areas and different types of brush strokes on the plain paper. They had a blast. We spent about 45 minutes painting the textured paper and then moving on to several other pieces of plain paper before they were done.

Here's how the painted textured ones turned out.

A couple of notes should you decide to try this activity yourself. You need lots of glue. And lots of toilet paper. We used about half a roll of toilet paper and ended up with relatively little final product.

Homemade Light Boxes

One of the things that is often incorporated into the activities featured on Play At Home Mom is a light table. I decided to make homemade light boxes for the kids (with my husband's help). They aren't quite finished, but they are functional.

First we bought two fairly small clear bins. We wanted them to each be able to play on their own and we liked the idea that they could even pull them into their laps if they wanted. We bought white spray paint (the kind designed to adhere to plastic) and spray painted the inside of the bin and some of the lid. We also bought battery powered florescent lights to put inside. I used some pattern paper I had gotten a while back from a fabric store and we use that to diffuse the light. Hopefully the pictures will make all of this clear.

So far, we have just played with translucent items on top of the box. Once they get bored with that, I'll start to introduce different art and sensory activities using the light box. So far we've used glass gems, mosaic shape tiles, translucent letters, and some translucent duplos on the box. The gems we sorted by color. The shapes can be sorted by color and shape. You can also use the shapes to make pictures. Two triangles make a diamond. Two squares make a rectangle. You can make a house or flower or anything else you can imagine. The translucent letters can just be sorted by color or letter or used to spell simple words. We didn't have enough translucent duplos to do much with, but they thought they looked really cool on the light box.

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