What evaluation tool is the SLP using to determine progress made? The Entire World of R Advance Screening considers 32 different types of /r/’s and provides percentages of correctness. This will give a good assessment of /r/ and can accurately track the response to intervention and thus progress made.

Anatomical issues may be a factor and should be something discussed with a doctor. However, do your children make a correct /r/ in any context? We’ve found in our research that just about all children can make a correct /r/ in some context. If the child can produce a correct sound in one context, then the ability is present to transfer to other sounds. Using correct production of sounds to elicit incorrect sounds is one of the tenents of The Entire World of R program.

I hope this information helps.

Christine

The best first step is to administer The Entire World of R Advanced Screening to see which /r/’s the student can and cannot produce. Does he replace /r/ for all the /r/’s or just some? We/You need more specific information to present to the mom and the Advanced Screening will provide that for you.

Christine

I work in a school setup. I see a student in middle school who cannot produce vocalic /r/. He replaces with /l/ sound. He has been receiving speech therapy for /r/ sound since 4 or 5 yrs. I’m seeing him since 6 months only, but other SLP was seeing him since 3 yrs. He has a h/o tourettes syndrome and ADD. he has tics. Mom is very demanding as there is no progress seen since years. Other SLPs say that he should take a break from therapy. Can you help me with this. I’ve a meeting with mom on 12/7/09.

Thanks & Regards,
Nithya.

I purchased The Entire World of RTM card games about three years ago and have since collected nearly all of Say It Right’s The Entire World of R products. I love these resources!

As a public school SLP with 25 years of experience, I think these are the absolute best resources anywhere for helping students correct the infamous vocalic /r/. Typically, if children don’t correct the /r/ sound early, they struggle with it for years—and so do we. By the later years of elementary school, students are usually bored in speech therapy sessions, but The Entire World of R has changed all that. The card games, for example, are a huge hit with kids. Rather than one game with the usual list of /r/ words, there are separate games for working on -air, -ar, -er, and so on. I love being able to expose kids to such a huge variety of /r/ words. Why keep repeating “car” when you can talk about “underwater”, “bruise”, “deerskin”, and “arduous”?! There are lots of options to engage kids of all ages both in the classroom and during practice at home.

I have been so happy with these resources that I have purchased all of them myself, rather than requisitioning them through the school district, so that I don’t have to give them up when I retire. My latest purchase, The Entire World of R Curriculum Book, may be the best yet. It includes activities for ABC order, synonyms and antonyms, punctuation, and capitalization, all aligned to the curriculum and all designed to advance the pronunciation of /r/ in all positions and blends.

Put simply, The Entire World of R really works. It makes my job easier. It makes the road to correct pronunciation easier for my students. And seeing them have so much fun on the journey reminds me why I became a speech therapist in the first place.

With the “Entire World of R”, she was able to produce her /r/ in all positions of words. I was able to dimiss her when she started 6th grade. I know that seems like a long time, but remember, I didn’t start therapy with her until she was in the 4th grade! Her IEP from her previous school was written for 30 minutes one time per week. That was not enough.
We used the homework lessons to coincide with the Entire World of R lessons and with all of this she was remediated. Yeah!!!! Her mother came to me later that year and she told me that her daughter said she wished I had been her speech therapist at her other school. She said that she would never have been in Speech for that long.
I have told my colleagues about “The Entire World of R.” I use the cards, the flip books EVERYTHING!!!! I love the “Entire World of R” and hope that others love it, too!! (I also bought the Entire World of S and it works, too.
THANK YOU!!!!!!
Missy Cornett
Flagstaff, AZ

Here’s a link to an article on R at Home [http://www.sayitright.org/article-R_at_Home.html] that should give you some suggestions. While I always recommend getting an evaluation conducted by a competent speech-language patholist (SLP) there’s no reason an informed parent should not be able to advance their child at home.

Your child’s SLP should be providing some homework and suggestions for transfering the positive results in the therapy into the real world.

Ultimately, especially at age 11, your daughter will have to take responsibility for her own speech. If she can articulate the sounds correctly, then she can do it. She’ll just have to break the habit of lazy speech. One trick is to have her put the rubber band on her wrist. For every misproduction, she should make a gentle snap just to remind herself to be more aware. Slowing down her speech should help as well.

I don’t have any experience with enlarged tonsils/adeniods or allergies affecting articulation. Perhaps someone reading this might? Please share.

If she can’t discern the difference correct/incorrect /r/’s, perhaps she’s not getting enough specific treatment on targeted sounds. In my progam, we seprate out all 21 vocalic /r/’s (plus the 11 /r/ blends). It’s important to target only a single sound at a time. The intensive treatment on only a single sound is what I find promotes the most progress. More information can be found here. [http://www.sayitright.org/R_Phonetic_Consistency.html]

Hope this helps.

Christine