Letter of the Week: W

Contrary to what we might think based on our recent weather, winter begins next weekend. In honor of the change of seasons we will be talking about all things cold, snowy and wintery! Technically, ‘w’ is a consonant. From a speech perspective, /w/ is a wind sound. It is a sound cousin to /h/ as both are made by an airstream relatively unobstructed by the lips and tongue.

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Letter of the Week: R

Are you ready for a new sound? It is Reindeer time! ‘R’ is a consonant and one of the later developing sounds. In fact, it is typically one of the last sounds to be mastered (often not until a child is 6 or 7). It can also be one of the trickiest. /r/ is a hard working sound as one of the most common sounds in English. To complicate things, it changes slightly depending upon where in the word it appears and the vowels around it. Have you heard the term "r-controlled vowels"? Yup. /r/ can be "vowel-like". So, for our purposes here I'll talk about 'r' in general terms.

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Easing back in with a Review Week

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and time spent with family. Since we took the week off last week to celebrate and count the blessings in our lives, this week we will ease back into our letter-sound of the week project with a review week. Of the 14 letters we have highlighted so far, we have covered 4 vowels (each with a short and a long sound) and 10 consonant sounds.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

This coming week is Thanksgiving week. It is a quiet holiday. Sandwiched between the glitz of Halloween and Christmas, Thanksgiving is a time to slow down, quielty reflect and count our blessings. Not just for the tangible things we have, but also to be grateful for those intangibles. In therapy, we have been talking about being thankful for little things (like that peppermint mocha I had this morning) and big things (like family and friends who love and support us).

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Letter of the Week: T

Thanksgiving is coming! We are talking about gratitude/thankfulness all month and have a subtle Thanksgiving theme. However, while Thanksgiving starts with the letter 't', it starts with the 'th' sound. And we are not ready to go there, yet. So, next week as we highlight the letter/sound 't' we'll be talkin' turkey! ‘T’ is a consonant. From a speech perspective, ‘t’ is a tip tapper. The tongue [tongue tip to be specific] is doing the work to make this sound.

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