Speech therapy apps have been designed as a convenient and accessible way to enhance language comprehension, strengthen vocal muscles, practice pronunciation, and receive personalized exercises. While catering to one’s individual needs, apps can also track progress and provide immediate feedback- just like a professional speech therapist.
In this blog, we will be discussing:
- How can I help my child with speech therapy at home?
- What are the top five free speech apps?
- What are the top five paid speech apps?
How Can I Help My Child With Speech Therapy At Home?
Practicing speech therapy at home is essential to growth and maintenance skills. Supporting your child’s journey outside the clinic is rewarding and complements their progress. Some tips for helping your child with speech therapy at home include:
- Consistency. This is key in any therapeutic process, so ensure your child gets the repetition they need for progress.
- Get your child talking! Engage in conversation daily and use open-ended questions to encourage more extended responses. Consistent conversations help promote expressive language development.
- Read aloud. Reading promotes vocabulary development, language comprehension, and listening skills.
- Sing songs and rhymes. These enhance rhythm and articulation- especially with familiar tunes.
- Mirroring. Encourage your child to watch your mouth as you speak so that they can try to imitate your sounds. This helps with articulation and clarity.
- Play pretend. Encourage your child to create stories and dialogues so they can both practice speech skills and creativity.
- Have patience. Results from speech therapy take time, so be patient with your child as they learn new skills!
- Use speech therapy apps. Utilize various apps that offer interactive exercises and activities. These are engaging and can provide your child with immediate, necessary feedback!
Remember that all kids learn differently, and every child’s speech development journey will be unique. Alongside practicing at home, exercise regular communication with your child’s therapist in order to track their progress and adjust any necessary strategies.
Top Five Free Speech Apps
Articulation Station
This is considered the most comprehensive articulation app, designed to allow children to practice pronouncing different sounds. You can choose from various activities, including flashcards, matching games, stories, and more. The first alphabetic letter to practice is free, but all other letters require an individual purchase.
Talk Tales, Simple Sounds
Designed by a speech therapist, this app is targeted at non-speaking and low-speaking children. Sounds can be easily taught with continuous repetition through an interactive storybook. This includes vowels and grunts (level 1), exclamations (level 2), and animal sounds (level 3).
Sago Mini First Words
This app, designed by speech-language pathologists, helps improve communication through engaging learning games. Activities include copying mouth movements, saying words aloud, and dragging and dropping items into place.
Speech Blubs
With over 1,500 activities, this app uses SLPs to improve children’s speech and pronunciation. Additional educational videos are also available! Speech Blubs is free to download and offers additional in-app purchases.
YouTube
As experts worldwide can upload educational content to this video platform, YouTube can provide diverse (and free) “how-to” videos on speech development. Social skills, articulation, phonics, and other basic concepts are at your fingertips.
Top Five Paid Speech Apps
Spilingo
With aliens and spaceships, children learn listening and language skills. The app focuses on nouns, adjectives, prepositions, and verbs with four different skill levels. This app starts at $1.99 and offers in-app purchases.
Speech Tutor
This app is based on 2D animated videos modeling how a mouth moves to pronounce sounds. Children can get an in-depth look into tongue and throat movement- and how those movements make specific sounds. With slow, medium, and fast practice speeds, this app is $24.99- and $69.99 for Speech Tutor Pro.
LAMP
LAMP, or Language Acquisition through Motor Planning, helps develop consistent motor patterns for words. It offers a wide variety of vocabulary words (over 3000) and is rated best for autistic children. This app costs $299.99 and requires an iPad with iOS 14.0.
Conversation Therapy
This app helps spark inspiration for conversation in small and large groups. It provides a variety of conversation categories, such as current events, hobbies, or interests. You can then select a question to be asked in your preferred form of sentence (simple, complex, etc.). Languages such as English, Spanish, Dutch, French, and Finnish are available to customize speech and language development. This app costs $24.99 and requires at least iOS 9.
Proloquo2Go
As an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) speech app, Proloquo2Go can be the voice of those with expressive language challenges. It’s a communication tool for adults and children alike and targets a variety of disabilities, including cerebral palsy, autism, TBIs, down syndrome, and more. Available for purchase at $249.99, this app can be used for daily communication and language skills building.
