Raising Talkers

Raising Talkers: How to Teach Your Child to Talk is an online course via the Facebook platform that I highly recommend for all parents with babies or young children. It is run by a speech and language therapist, Weronika Ozpolot, who shares her knowledge on the best ways to help children to gain the skills essential for communication.

I took the course this summer and I want to share my experience with the course as I know speech is a big worry for moms (and dads). I’m not a first time mom (I took the course when Kyle was 4 and Zaki was 1) and I’m a Language Acquisition teacher and I learned information from the course that was beneficial to my children!

Each week of the course Weronika posts a video and workbook in the Facebook group. Throughout the course, Weronika is receptive to answering questions during live Q&A sessions which is a benefit from taking the course that you wouldn’t get from simply reading a book on language development.

Topics addressed include typical speech and language development from birth to five years. Weronika includes easy to understand checklists which you can fill out to see where your children are at in terms of their individual development compared to typical development. This is especially helpful as then you can see if your kids are on track or if there are some areas that need extra attention.

She also includes information for bilingual children. This I was particularly interested in as it pertains to my multicultural family. Many people are often critical of our decisions to raise multilingual children saying that’s why my boys started speaking late. The research showed in the modules show a slight 2-3 month delay, which is nothing when you compare to the numerous benefits outlined by Weronika.

Weronika also covers atypical speech and language development. She discusses speech sound difficulties, language delay, autism and stuttering. She outlines environmental causes for speech and language difficulties and discusses the reasoning behind them (which is particularly helpful for those with stubborn husbands like mine who always wants the TV on as background noise even if no one is watching it!)

The part I found most helpful was strategies to boost your child's speech and language skills and her ideas for fun activities and games to play with your child to boost their speech and language skills.

If you’re interested in signing up or learning more, I encourage you to check out the Multicultural Motherhood website. The price (at the time of publishing this post) is £65 but she often does an early bird discount of £55. This course will really benefit your children In Sha Allah and you are also supporting the efforts of a fellow Muslimah who is a homeschooling mama like many of you!