About this activity
Sixteen words with /s/ clusters: spoon, spider, spot, spill and spin for sp; star, stop, stamp, stick and stove for st; sky, skate, skunk, skip and school for sk; and desk, where the cluster is at the end. A child who has /s/ on its own often loses it in a cluster, and which consonant follows makes a measurable difference.
How to use it in a session
Hold the /s/ and then release into the stop. Sssspoon gives the fricative time to be produced before the cluster demands a stop, and shortening the hold afterwards is the fading. Group by cluster — five sp words in a row make the pattern clearer than sixteen mixed. Desk is worth its own moment, since a final cluster is a different task from an initial one. Eight minutes covers a subset.
What to listen for
Listen for reduction against insertion. Poon for spoon has lost the /s/; suh-poon has separated the two consonants. Reduction usually responds to holding the /s/ first; insertion to speeding the two up. Watch school, which is spelled with ch and sounds with a /k/ — a reading complication that has nothing to do with the speech target.
Carrying it home
Spoon, star, stop and school are ordinary words. Asking the child to say the word rather than correcting how they said it keeps this from turning into a correction routine at meals.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- First through fourth, for students who have /s/ and lose it in clusters.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all sixteen cards play with no account.
- My child says 'poon' for 'spoon'. What is that?
- Cluster reduction — the /s/ is dropped rather than separated. Holding the /s/ before the rest of the word usually helps more than repeating the whole word.