Speech Boosting Stories by Clickety Books
Anne Ayre, SLT at Clickety Books
Sound loaded stories are a fun and effective way to support children with delayed speech sounds. Children love sound play – it’s fun! And it helps develop their ability to recognise and say speech sounds in different words. This is important for both clear speech and phonological awareness.
These stories ideally have a systematic concentration of a given sound target, or targets, in a range of different words and vowel contexts. They provide multiple opportunities for children to hear and practise saying words with target phonemes. An enjoyable and interactive storyline is highly motivating and makes it easy for children to anticipate what happens next and join in when they hear it again.
Heather Stevens, SLT – Training Coordinator
I’ve been involved with Speech Link Multimedia Limited from the very beginning. I was working as an NHS speech and language therapist in Kent at the time the initial project was being carried out in schools in the county. When I started working for the company there were just 5 of us in the team who moved into our first office in Canterbury in 2007. In those days the reports were generated manually and my job was to input data and to proof read all of the reports before they were packed up and posted to the schools.
Thankfully things have moved on a bit since then!!!
Gradually my role in training evolved and I now act as coordinator for our training programmes. I’ve enjoyed travelling the country giving information about our new website to users. It’s so much easier to present the new site because everything sits together in a much more logical way. I’m also enjoying moving forward with developing our webinar training.
Over the years much has changed in my work and my personal life. My “Speech Link family” has been there for me through good times and bad and I really value their friendship and support.
When I’m not at work I enjoy gardening and cryptic crosswords. My favourite activity is one I have come to relatively recently – being a granny to Noah who is about to be three. I’ve loved watching (forensically!!) his speech and language skills develop and he’s given me lots of material to use for anecdotes when training. I look forward to him mastering the /gr/ consonant blend so that I become a granny rather than a fanny!!!
Surprising fact about me that people may not know… in 2015 I fulfilled a bucket list wish and went with my lifelong best friend to Glastonbury … ‘dancing on the ceiling’ with Lionel Ritchie and ‘seeing for miles’ with The Who. That’s my generation!
If I were to give one tip to schools it would be to always remember the 10 second rule – give children time to think about what you’ve asked and to plan their response.
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