Vowel Sounds Speech Activities for Toddlers Speech Therapy at Home

Is your toddler’s speech difficult to understand? Or does he have very limited words that all sound similar? The culprit is often a lack of vowel sounds. Once a toddler learns to use more vowels, their speech generally improves by leaps and bounds.

For the longest time, my 18 month old son seemed to have a single word he used for everything. “Duh-duh” If he wanted to go outside, he would point out the window and say “duh-duh.” If he wanted candy, he would do his approximation of the ASL sign for candy, poking a finger to his cheek, and say “duh-duh.”

I thought he needed to gather more consonant sounds before he could learn more words, so every week I set time aside to teach him more consonants like “p” and “t” and “s.” But that didn’t seem to help. What he actually needed were more vowels! He had the neutral “uh” sound, and he had the “ah” sound because he knew how to say mama and papa. But he had no other vowel sounds.

These activities will guide you step-by-step as you help your toddler learn more vowels sounds.