One of the most powerful tools in your R therapy toolkit is coarticulation. Coarticulation recognizes that speech sounds aren’t produced in isolation—they are influenced by the sounds around them. This concept is especially critical when it comes to teaching the R sound. Learn more in this blog post by SLP Madness.

By using coarticulation, you can identify the right phonetic context to help your students nail those tricky vocalic Rs. Instead of focusing on isolated sounds, you create opportunities for success by building on what students can do. This is where a solid screening tool comes into play.

When it comes to working with students with speech sound disorders, what works for a student with articulation needs, may not work for your phonology kiddo, and probably doesn’t work for a child with apraxia of speech. Not to mention that within those classifications, no two cues work the same for different kids.

That said, we should have multiple cues ready to go in our bag of tricks when working with students.

Here are my Top 10 cues for Speech Sound Disorders: