Happy Halloween everyone! I recently developed a program to help correct frontal lisping. It has a lot of pictures of silly monsters and that makes this posting today appropriate! It concentrates on retraining the tongue to stay behind the teeth by having the student say a lot of words that require alveolar ridge placement (bump behind your upper teeth), and than the program moves on to correcting the "s" sound with better tongue placement in the back of the mouth. I've borrowed portions of this therapy technique from other SLP's, and have added some of my own strategies, diagrams, and words to help make it a complete program for correcting frontal lisping. I have used this strategy with several kids and have found a lot of success with it. I hope it helps someone that you know too who is struggling with the tricky sound of "s"! Cheers to keeping that tongue inside where it should be for making the "s" sound! Please just click on our TpT or Teachers Notebook links to see previews of the program and if you wish to buy it for your own use. Also, feel free to share the information with a friend or teacher that may be interested. A link to the preview of the program is below. Best wishes for a fun and productive lesson with your kiddos soon. Sincerely, Manda, MA-CCC-SLP Link to Lisping Program at Teachers Pay Teachers here. Link to Lisping Program at Teachers Notebook. What is a frontal lisp? A lisp is a Functional Speech Disorder (FSD), and a functional speech disorder is a difficulty learning to make a specific speech sound, or a few specific speech sounds. Typically, when a person lisps their tongue either protrudes between, or touches, their front teeth and the sound they make is more like a 'th' than a “s”. Protruding the tongue between the front teeth while attempting “s “ is referred to as 'interdental' production, and touching the front teeth with the tongue while attempting to produce “s” is called 'dentalised' production. Usually kids who are demonstrating a frontal lisp will substitute a sound close to the voiceless /th/ for the /s/. You may hear words that sound like this: ”saw” sounds like ” thaw” , ”grasshopper” sounds like ”grathhopper”, and ”class” sounds like “clath”. Children developing speech along typical lines may have interdental lisps until they are about 4½ - after which they disappear. If they don't 'disappear' a speech language pathologist should complete an assessment and initiate treatment as demeaned appropriate. Bowen, C. (November 2011) Lisping – When /s/ and /z/ are hard to say, Speech-Language-Therapydot.com Retrieved 10/18/2012 from: http://www.speech-language-therapy.com/index.phpoption=com_content&view=article&id=86:lisp&catid=11:admin