See and Learn Speech Sounds

See and Learn Speech Sounds is the first step in See and Learn Speech. It is designed to help young children with Down syndrome listen to and learn speech sounds, identify the differences between sounds and to produce individual speech sounds.

See and Learn Speech Sounds supports activities that encourage attention, listening, discrimination and production of the sounds that make up speech. See and Learn Speech Sounds introduces 41 speech sounds (phonemes) in the English language with clear picture card prompts. Later steps in See and Learn Speech build on these skills to combine individual sounds in simple vowel consonant combinations and then whole words.

See and Learn Speech Sounds can help parents, teachers and therapists support regular speech practice. Research suggests that practice and repetition are necessary to develop clearer speech.

Activities

See and Learn Speech Sounds includes four activities.

  • Listening to Single Sounds - this activity is designed to help children become familiar with the sounds in their language and to store these sounds in their memory system. It also teaches your child to associate each sound with a picture prompt.
  • Listening to Different Sounds - this activity is designed to help children hear and notice the differences between sounds (discrimination). This skill is important for speech and language development: children need to able to hear the differences between sounds to learn the meanings of similar sounding words (for example, fat, cat, sat) and to produce similar sounding words.
  • Selecting Different Sounds - this activity tests your child's discrimination skills by asking them to identify a spoken sound by choosing the sound card representing the sound.
  • Saying Sounds - as your child learns the sounds in speech and learns to discriminate between them they are developing some of the skills necessary to begin to produce sounds spontaneously - this activity helps them to practise producing speech sounds.

Suitability

See and Learn Speech Sounds is designed for use with babies from around six months of age and preschool children. You can use the sound cards with children of any age above six months to practise listening, discrimination and the production of sounds.

Some older children will be listening to, discriminating and producing many sounds spontaneously, but may still be unable to produce some individual speech sounds. You can use the See and Learn Speech Sounds cards to help these children learn to say these specific sounds.

Editions and features

See and Learn Speech Sounds is available as a printed kit or as an app. Both feature:

In addition, the apps offer:

Editions

Kits

Order printed kit

Apps

Download on the Apple App Store badge

We hope to bring back support for Android and Windows devices in 2024, though this is dependent on sufficient funding to work on updates for these platforms.

Related resources

See and Learn Speech Sounds is the first step in the See and Learn Speech programme. The next step is See and Learn Combining Sounds.