Here are some activities to help your child’s:

• breath control
• pitch
• volume

All of these activities will be easier when you are sitting comfortably and are well supported. Practice these activities each day. Try to get a little better each week.

Breath control activities

Practice breathing out slowly and steadily and then try some short, quick breaths. Do this by:

- tearing up a tissue and blowing the pieces off the table in one quick breath
- blowing the pieces of tissue slowly across the table in slow, steady breaths
- blowing bubbles. Use a long, steady breath to make one big bubble and a quicker breath to make lots of little bubbles.

Practice breathing out for as long as possible with the activities below.

- count to five slowly on one breath. As this gets easier, see how high you can go on one breath.
- Breathe in to the count of three and then say ‘ah’ until your voice is gone.
- Breathe in to the count of three and then say ‘sssssss’ until your air is all gone.
- Line up some birthday candles in play-dough. Take a breath and see how many you can blow out in one long breath out.
- Blow out the candles one at a time. Only use one breath of air, but try to stop and start it in puffs to blow out each candle – ‘p, p, p’

Pitch control

The word “pitch” refers to the high and low sounds of your voice. You can think of a mouse having a very high squeaky voice and an elephant having a very low voice. Here are some activities to help develop your high and low voice:

• Listen to people talking and decide whether they have a high voice or a low voice (for example, on the “Winnie the Pooh” TV show, Piglet has a high voice and Eeyore has a low voice)
• Practice saying ‘aaah’ in a low voice and then ‘aaah’ in a high voice
• Count to three making ‘one’ very low, ‘two’ in your normal voice and ‘three’ very high.
• When you are good at the last activity, try counting from one to five getting gradually higher and then go down low again.

Volume control

Volume control is about how loud and soft your voice can be. If your voice is too soft, people won’t be able to hear you, but if it’s too loud, you will hurt your voice. Practice these activities:

• Practice counting to five in a very soft voice
• Practice counting in a loud voice
• Count from 1-5 changing how loud your voice is. Say 1 softly and gradually get louder so that 5 is very loud (but not yelling!)
• Count from 5-1 and make your voice get softer as you go.
• When you are good at these activities, try count up to ten making every second number loud:

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10

© Marinet Van Vuren, DSC 2009

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