Friday, October 25, 2013

/h/

In my 5 1/2 years as an SLP I have only worked with one child on the /h/ sound.  It was about 4 years ago and I can't even remember what he substituted, but I know he made a substitution.  I created my own artic cards for /h/ because I didn't have any on hand. 

Tricks I used:
  • When we started working on the sound I would hold up a mirror and make the /h/.  It fogged up the mirror.  Then, he would try.  It took a lot of practice but he did finally get it. 
  • I would tell him "breath out hard and loud".  At first he was breathing through his nose so we had to remedy that by pinching his nose shut. 
  • I would also have him "huff" cotton balls across the table. 
  • I would remind him to keep his mouth open-so that his articulators couldn't "get in the way" and create a distortion or substitution.
An interesting thing about the /h/ sound is that it never occurs at the end of a word.  (If you can think of a word ends with the /h/ sound please correct me.)  There are words that have an "h" as the last letter but it is silent or part of another phoneme.  And, "hedgehog" is the only word that I can think of with an /h/ in the middle and that is only because it is a compound word. So, to practice "medial" /h/ I had to use short phrases like "the hat", "my head", and "I'm here". 

Here is a short list of initial /h/ words that should be fairly easy to find pictures for. 
head, hand, hit, house, horse, husband, hot, hen, hug, hat, ham, heel, who, hear, him, hyena

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