Sail Into Sounds

Mrs Gibbings

Certified practitione

Sail Into Sounds is a speech and language programme for early years education settings, (2 years & 3-5 years - up to the end of foundation stage), developed by Bedfordshire and Luton speech and language therapists.

Practitioners complete training and pass a quality accreditation visit by the speech and language therapy team, to be certified to deliver the Sail Into Sounds programme.

The programme consists of 6 sessions each lasting approximately 15-20 minutes for groups of 4-6 children. Many children have difficulties with their speech sound development and the sessions provide an opportunity for focused support for children’s attention and listening, phonological awareness and speech sound production skills.

All the Sail Into Sounds activities focus on input skills, rather than asking children to produce sounds. A multi-sensory approach is used, so children can see the practitioner making the sound, they hear it, and can feel it (the airflow). This improves phonemic awareness: the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words and it also improves motivation and helps children to retain new information more easily. Activities and target sounds are shared with families to support their children’s speech sound development through daily routine.