Gold Coast Health is recognised for quality patient care, nursing and midwifery excellence and innovations in professional nursing and midwifery practice under the Magnet® Recognition Program.
"Walking together in kindness" artwork produced for Gold Coast Health by Riki Salam, We are 27 Creative.It can be normal for children to drop off ‘s’ from ‘s’ cluster words such as “stop”, and “snake” until 4 years of age. They might say “poon” for spoon. Some children will mark the ‘s’ sound but drop off the second sound in the cluster (e.g. “sake” for snake).
You can help your child produce ‘s’ clusters by trying the following strategies:
Children generally have more success with ‘s’ clusters starting with ‘sn’ and ‘sm’. Starting with these ‘s’ clusters can generalise across to other ‘s’ clusters.
If your child is struggling with those ‘s’ clusters, then they may have more success with ‘st’ words, as the ‘t’ can support the placement of ‘s’.
Other /s/ clusters include ‘sw’, ‘sk’ , ‘sl’, ‘spr’, ‘scr’, ‘spl’ which may also require practice. It will take time and practice for children to develop their speech sounds.
Children may be able to say a sound on its own but will take time to put it into words. Longer words will be trickier. It will take time and practice to be able to say their new sound in everyday conversation.
Some words are more complex because they have harder sounds, multiple sounds, or different combinations of sounds.
