About this activity
Eight sentences carrying several initial /r/ words each: The rabbit runs down the road. Ray rides a red bike. The robot can reach the rock. Rosa reads in her room. The raccoon ran in the rain. Ryan rows to the river. The rooster woke up the ranch. Rita wraps a round present. Three or four targets per sentence, all in initial position, which keeps one variable constant while the length increases.
How to use it in a session
Model, repeat, then produce independently. Keeping every target in initial position is deliberate — it isolates the effect of length from the effect of position, so a student who breaks down here is running out of monitoring rather than hitting a harder context. Shorten the sentence rather than dropping back to words if accuracy collapses. Five minutes is a full pass.
What to listen for
Listen for the third and fourth targets. Most students hold the first two and lose the rest, and where that happens tells you how much sustained monitoring is available. Watch Rita wraps a round present, where wraps is spelled with a w and sounds with an /r/ — a student reading the sentence may hesitate for a spelling reason rather than a speech one.
Carrying it home
One sentence a day is realistic. Pick the one with the most familiar words and ask the child to say it to somebody, which is a different task from practising it.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- Second through fifth, for students accurate on /r/ in phrases.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all eight sentences play with no account.
- Why are all the targets in initial position?
- To isolate one variable. Length and position are two different difficulties, and keeping the position constant tells you whether the breakdown is about monitoring over a longer utterance or about a harder sound context.