Top Tips For Making the R Sound At Home
Here are 3 ways to support a child (or adult) learning the /r/ sound at home. These are NOT a replacement for speech therapy, but they are a great way to practice at home, or to teach your child more about the /r/ sound as they are acquiring it in typical speech development, or while they are seeing a therapist if the sound is delayed. If you’re a therapist looking for some new ways to practice /r/ in speech sessions, these will work for that too. :)
Visit our YouTube, to see Hailey talk more about /r/ and each strategy. One thing we need to note about /r/ is that there are two ways to produce it. One is often referred to as the “bunched r” and the other is referred to as the “retroflexed” or “flippy r”. Most of these strategies will focus on the “bunched r”, which is made by keeping your tongue high up and tight in the back of your mouth, usually touching the insides of your back molars.
1. Facilitative Contexts
Using “Facilitative contexts” is a fancy way of saying, use specific words to facilitate or help with accurate productions of /r/. The words you choose do matter, and some make saying the /r/ sound harder, and some make it easier. We want to focus on the words that make the /r/ sound easier. /R/, mainly focused on that “bunched r” here, requires a high tongue position in your mouth. There are other sounds that also require a higher tongue position, and can help with more naturally encouraging the tongue to be in the right spot.
A few examples of facilitative contexts for /r/ are words like “reach” (high “ee” sound), “carrot”, “bring”, “great”, “pirate” and “karla”.
Play around and pay attention to what the child is saying. Are there any words where he makes a better /r/ sound, or where it seems to suddenly sound right? Look for those and when you find one, practice it! It is far better to practice from a place of success with /r/. There are a lot more resources for facilitative contexts on the web, a few of my favorites are from Rock the R and Adventures in Speech Pathology. Reach Speech Therapy does not have a connection, financial or otherwise, with either website.
2. Train Tracks
Oftentimes before practicing /r/ in words, it is very help to provide some teaching on anatomy and where the tongue should be in a student’s mouth. I like to start by talking about our teeth as train tracks. You can have your child feel their teeth with their tongue, and find both their front teeth and their back teeth (molars).
Then, you can talk about how some sounds use the tip of our tongue, like /t/, but other sounds use different parts of our tongue, like /k/. For /r/, the “bunched r” here again, we need to use the sides of our tongue. You can use a popsicle stick, actual popsicle, toothbrush or lollipop to touch the sides of your child’s tongue and show them what part of their tongue they should be using. Not sure what I’m talking about? Check out Peachie Speechie’s videos on producing the /r/ sound.
After this brief teaching on anatomy, now we can talk more about the /r/ sound and our teeth as train tracks. To make a great /r/ sound, we need to use the sides of our tongue and slide them back along our train tracks until they are touching our back teeth. If our tongues don’t stay up there on the tracks and in the back, it won’t be a good /r/ sound and will sound more like the “uh” sound.
Practice with finding the right spot, and sliding the sides of your tongue back along the train tracks for better /r/ productions.
This teaching of anatomy, and reviewing of /r/ at the sound level works well for older kids too. Give them feedback on what you hear and what the sound should sound like, and watch videos or practice with the staRt app together.
3. Growling Sound
We are trying to find that good /r/ sound to put into words, and just like with facilitative contexts there are certain sounds that can help us along. One sound is a “grr” or growl. I have had students who cannot make their /r/ sound in words, but can make a growling sound like a tiger. Start from there! Try “grr-eat” “grr-apes” “grr-een” with the growling sound, and build it into words from there. A speech therapist is a great support with finding the right contexts and building on a child’s original successes!