Sunday, August 21, 2016

Best Year Ever! Bonus Sale Products and Tips from SLPs

We ALL have them….decks and decks of speech sound cards. Do you pull out some of the cards because they are not good choices for your students? Maybe you pull out a lot of the cards! Many of the popular card sets feature odd photos or pictures, vocabulary words that aren’t used in your geographic region or inappropriate speech sound contexts. After feeling frustrated with those limitations, I made a decision to DO something about it! And here is the result….

This set is for R, S and L in the initial, medial and final positions of words. These cards are bright, colorful photos that my students LOVE! Word choices include commonly used vocabulary.

Now, a word about medial sounds---especially our “friend” the R sound. I am VERY particular about medial R and how it is presented and practiced. ALL of the medial sounds in this set of cards are intervocalic. Intervocalic means in between two vowel sounds, as in "berry" and "cheering." This is especially important for the R sound. While I can’t specifically remember where I learned this concept; it was undoubtedly from either Pam Marshalla or Char Boshart. You will find students are more likely to be successful working on intervocalic R rather than other “medial” sound choices, such as "arm" or "bird." Why? When the R is followed by another consonant, it influenced by the following consonant and this often results in a mis-articulated R sound. Think of co-articulation or the articulation of two or more speech sounds together, so that one influences the other. Here are more examples of intervocalic R words:  parrot, cherry, arrow, giraffe. You can see that the R is in between two vowel sounds thereby reducing the coarticulatory effect. Try it and see what happens!

Now you have many reasons to go and purchase my Artic Pix cards! 

Wishing you the Best Year Ever!


  1. What great photos! I totally agree- intervocalic /r/ needs to be mastered first before adding consonants. Great tip!

  2. I'm checking these out for sure! They look great!

  3. They look beautiful! So colorful!