Pre-Phonemic Listening Skills

Before children begin to speak and develop literacy they show the ability to distinguish non-speech environmental sounds (e.g. a been bag falling on a wooden floor vs. a plastic ball falling on a wooden floor) and to identify objects by the sound they make (e.g. a horn, a bell, a helicopter).

In this post you will find a few speech therapy activities for exercising these early listening skills. These are not just for kids who can’t talk yet. Think of these as warm-up or introductory activities to do before practicing more advanced skills. The goal for most children is to become more conscious of differences in sounds, and in their ability to hear and process those sounds.

1. Sound screen
• Gather 6-10 things that make noise. These may include:
• Musical instruments
• Wooden sticks for tapping together
• Keys for rattling
• A bottle… to tap on or blow across the top
• Stand or sit across from your child with some sort of visual barrier between you so you can make noises without your child seeing what you’re doing. One by one, make a noise with each object and ask your child to practice listening skills by identifying the object that made the noise. After your child guesses, show the object you used.
• Give your child a turn to be the one who makes the noises for you, and you practice your listening skills.
• When done, place the noisemakers in an open box or on an accessible shelf or table for a few days, and encourage your child to play with them independently.
2. Sounds Shake
•  For this activity, you’ll need about an even number (a dozen or so) of small plastic containers that are not see-through. Old 35mm film canisters are ideal. Those colored plastic eggs that people put candy in at Easter also work well.
• Put small objects like beads, paper clips, rubber bands, rice, dry beans, salt, etc., into pairs of containers.
• Place all the containers on a table or on the floor between you and your child.
• Pick up two of the containers; shake first one, then the other. Ask your child if they sound the same or different.
• If they sound the same, open both to see what made the sound. If different, put one down and pick up another container and repeat the test. Continue until you find a match, then open them to verify that they really are the same.
3. Sound Scan
• Stand outside with your child  (in the yard, on a porch, in a park, or on a sidewalk). Close your eyes together for about a minute and listen quietly. Then open your eyes and discuss what you heard while you were listening.
• What did you hear that was far away?
• What did you hear that was near by?
• What did you hear that was loud?
• What did you hear that was quiet?
• What did you hear that made a high sound?
• What did you hear that made a low sound?
• What did you hear that sounded big?
• What did you hear that sounded small?
4. Sound Localization
•  Have your child stand in the middle of a room wearing a blindfold or with hands over eyes (no peeking!). Toss a beanbag onto the floor a meter or so from where your child is standing, and have your child turn toward where the beanbag landed. Remove the blindfold so your child can see how accurate s/he was. As a variation on this activity, you can have your child hold a beanbag and try to hit yours after you toss it.

Source: Speech-Language-Development.com