Does your child struggle with stuttering? Are you searching for simple, concrete ways to help your little one achieve improved speech clarity and comprehension? Tens of millions of individuals all over the world stutter, about 3 million of which are in the United States. With time, patience, and the right techniques, your child can learn to refine his or her speech patterns and experience significant language development. If you would like to help your child get rid of stuttering and learn some effective approaches to attain this end, the best place to start is with WH questions.
What Are WH Questions?
You might wonder what WH questions even are and how they could make such a significant difference in the lives of stuttering individuals. Essentially, such questions are the “When?”, “Who?”, ”Why?”, “What?”, “Where?”, and “How?” queries that seek to know details regarding people, places, things, time, facts, and so forth.
These categories of questions use different combinations of words to seek information based on the data you are trying to discover. For example, the word combinations used for a question asking “Why?” would be divergent from the structure of a query asking “Who?”. These questions are an excellent supplemental tool for speech therapy and helpful linguistic exercises. They enable your child to learn key pieces of information relevant to the outside world, to understand and take part in meaningful dialogues with other individuals, to sharpen language abilities to a more innate function, and increase crucial knowledge of regular speech patterns.
If you think about most children in the context of early development, they will usually pepper you with questions once they being to speak, asking “Why this?”, or “What is that?”, and so on. This is part of a child’s normal curiosity and interest in the world around them, as they seek to form and understand deeper connections with their environment and other people in it. In the case of children with speech impediments like stuttering, this natural inclination to pose a myriad of questions in the interest of development and discovery is often lost. At the very least, it is far from a natural impulse.
Thus, to achieve healthy mental and speech development practices, it is important to teach children struggling in these areas what such questions are and instill the associated curiosity and knowledge. WH questions are valuable tools used by speech therapists to aid stutterers in holding normal conversations, in understanding social and academic constructs, and in attaining knowledge crucial to normal, everyday life. As a parent, there are many ways you can amplify the abilities your child is gaining via speech therapy by practicing these questions at home and using exercises that implement them.
Why Are WH Questions Helpful for Stuttering?
One of the most important reasons these kinds of questions are useful to ease stuttering is that they enable your child to understand and process information. When these types of questions do not occur normally in your child’s thought processes and interactions, the outside world can seem a confusing place lacking complete sense.
Understanding the reasons behind everyday life and knowing these subtle social construct cues simplifies both basic and complex activities. WH questions give your child knowledge about the world around them and the environment in which they live. Basic questions like “When do we sleep?”, and “Who teaches children at school?”, may appear to be negligible queries that anyone could answer. Yet, when you have a speech impediment like stuttering, these typical understandings that other children learn as soon as they can comprehend conversation, are abstract concepts. Practicing informational questions gives your child the ability to focus on the details behind them and understand that data more fully.
If your child stutters, one of the most obvious obstacles he or she may face is in holding consistent social interactions. Stuttering can make even the most basic of conversations a challenge, and it is not uncommon for children dealing with these impediments to avoid social situations that will display their struggles.
As the parent of a stuttering child, it is important to help your little one feel comfortable socially and know how to detect subtle language cues. WH questions are great conversation starters with your child, teaching him or her how to engage and answer queries in a succinct context. They help train your child to receive language signals and respond in kind, which is invaluable in working to improve and eradicate stuttering.
Increasing Language Skills
When your child’s brain is retrained to accept and release language forms by the use of these multifaceted questions, this will sharpen his or her skills as never before. The crux of holding conversations lies in the ability to understand, receive, and convey information. In the case of children with a speech impediment, these processes are not functioning properly, causing a significant delay and the resulting language issues.
WH questions teach your child to plan queries, transmit information, and receive it back in a comprehensive manner. This will not only serve them well in social settings, but in every area of life including school, work, extracurricular activities, and beyond.
Stimulating Mental Capabilities
What is the main, driving purpose that causes anyone to ask questions? The answer is to learn something, find out a new piece of information, or to clarify a concept. Questions and answers are such commonplace fixtures of everyday conversation it is easy to gloss over their importance.
If your child is not naturally forming these questions in his or her mind or is not sure how to pose them due to language difficulties, using WH questions to retrain the brain and the tongue will work wonders. Not only will your child be able to gain greater knowledge about life and the outside world, but the strides this makes through confidence building are irreplaceable.
WH Questions to Use
Games and Activities
The first method we will touch upon in using these questions to help your stuttering child is implementation via games and activities. The website Teachers Pay Teachers is an incredible marketplace resource filled with fun and easy ways to incorporate such questions into your child’s life with helpful, creative exercises.
Check out WH Questions Bingo or Pizza Party. The first has a different bingo game for every question category, and options to mix things up to help your child discern diverse types of queries. It includes 10 playing boards and 17 calling cards for every game, which will give you endless varieties of options for entertainment and education. WH Questions Pizza Party has 90 different queries. For every question your child gets right, he or she will gain another topping to add to the pizza.
A similar offering from the same creator of the Pizza Party game, the Build An Ice Cream Picture Scenes activity is a definite winner. The game contains 25 pictures and 450 supplemental questions for learning ease. It also comes with an extra card set of 96 questions for higher level learning opportunities, with plenty of fun colors and ice cream optics to catch your child’s attention.
If you want to help your child improve their stuttering by attaining better listening and reactionary skills, the WH Questions Listening Comprehension Activity is another exceptional choice. It contains 100 excerpts for reading, 100 question-and-answer sets, and 100 activity sheets. This activity is ideal for older children in learning to identify and listen for details and comprehending the associated information.
Resources for Practice
If you would like easy exercises to practice these questions with your kids, there are other great options from the same Teachers Pay Teachers marketplace that are less geared towards games and more inclined towards quantified information comprehension. The WH Questions Flip Cards set has 3 different levels spread over 100 cards, using pictures and words.
Another solid resource on this site is the WH Questions Task Cards set, containing 200 different cards geared towards improved conversation, information comprehension, sharpened vocabulary, and academic development. A great supplement to school and speech therapy, this option allows your child to study on their own or with your help, posing an excellent tool for frequent use.
The WH Questions Scenes resource is better for younger children, using optics to train your child how to pose and answer these types of queries. The set has 9 visual scenes and 90 corresponding questions. If you are looking for a workbook to help your child improve his or her stuttering, you might also like the WH Questions Interactive Book. This one contains 24 pages of visuals and instructions, to teach your child the meaning of questions through picture usage.
Perhaps your child works with a speech therapist at school or you are looking for some materials to supplement his or her academic journey. Whatever the case may be, resources that equip your child to do well in his or her studies are essential.
We can recommend a few on the Teachers Pay Teachers website for this purpose, the first of which is the I Can Answer WH Questions Workbook. This one is designed for speech therapists, but could also be used at home to practice with your child. The 70-page workbook teaches the notion behind these types of questions and dissects the variances between them. Each lesson builds on the last and increases in difficulty to achieve better speech development patterns.
The No Prep WH Questions Bundle Worksheets are a great resource of over 150 pages of exercises with pictures to practice at home. A couple other solid homework help aids are the Listening Comprehension WH Questions set and the Reading Comprehension WH Questions and Data Bundle. The former has 40 pictures supplemented by 40 sentence and paragraph questions. The latter uses 200 booklets to improve studying habits, reading comprehension, conversation, and motor skills. It has so much material you can use it for a whole school year and never run out of worksheets for your child to complete.
We have touched upon some exceptional activities and resources for training your child to form, process, relay, and answer queries. Now, it is time to touch upon some key question examples you can practice at home with your child. If you would prefer to review these concepts consistently with your stuttering child spending no money on hard copy resources, these queries are a fantastic way to reinforce the concepts he or she is learning in speech therapy:
These are all great ones to get your child’s conversational and creative juices flowing. Each answer teaches your child about a regular habit or safety element key to everyday function.
You can also try asking questions that would lead to longer, more personalized answers:
These types of questions help your child identify a memory and discuss it, improving the overall flow of conversation by touching upon simple topics.
Understanding the role that people play in society and culture will give your child knowledge and understanding of these functions in a broader sense. Try asking questions like:
Try asking this questions
Your stuttering child will not learn these basic functions at an early age of their own accord as other children might because the stuttering brain is not innately geared towards such queries. Teach your child how to ask questions and stimulate interest in why it is important to know the answers. This will incentivize your child to ask questions independently.
Questions asking “Why?” are usually the ones we most commonly think of as emanating from small children. If your child stutters, they may not be focusing on these details or be able to formulate them into actual questions. You can help train your child to know the reason behind certain actions and develop queries that explain those actions.
The following inquiries will definitely get the conversation started:
Each of these types of questions either teaches your child something about the surrounding world or helps instill a reason why they do what they do.
Posing “What?” questions to help your child ease and get rid of his or her stuttering is a solid place to start if you do not want to make things too complicated starting out. These sorts of queries usually involve short answers but will get your child thinking, wondering, speaking, and planning succinct speech.
Try inquiries such as:
These queries can all lead to other questions, answers, and conversation building.
If you want to encourage your child to engage with longer answers to “What?” questions, use starters such as:
Finally, “Where?” questions are an excellent method to aid a child in understanding what they are seeing in the world around them and comprehend the confines of certain social structures.
Some excellent questions include:
You can also use questions to lead to longer conversations and build on those concepts. Examples of such questions would be:
WH questions are a vital tool to help your child overcome stuttering and achieve more fluid, effortless language abilities. Practicing these types of questions at home as a supplement to speech therapy is crucial to instilling and retaining the concepts learned with a language professional. Whether it be through the use of workbooks, games, or simple conversation, practicing such questions will be invaluable to your child’s development process and help him or her achieve optimal fluency and confidence when speaking.