Teddy is more than a friendly and engaging bear face. He has been designed specifically to help the child visualize and describe Teddy’s own production of sounds! If you look closely, the focus is on the parts of the bear that will support learning sounds: his mouth, nose (for some sounds) and throat area.
A closer look at Teddy Talker®’s CUE system is built into the visuals to represent these features:
• voice: bowtie red=voice off; bowtie green=voice on
• nasal sounds: honey on Teddy’s nose
• windy, extra air sounds: breath cue
So you can support learning by having the child identify and produce each sound with the support of these visuals. As a bonus, each phoneme also has a corresponding rhyme with cognitive cueing, teaching the children about articulation in child-friendly, simple terms. These 38 poems also bring Teddy’s world to life! Introduce some of his wildlife friends and family and develop interesting associations for each sound. Encourage children to draw and write from the poem. It’s fun to produce sounds with Teddy’s Mouth Position Cards with Reinforcement Rhymes!
So our work on individual sounds begins with a simple, engaging and happy bear face. After the child is successful, Teddy can appear in his full body version in Phoneme Friends! There are new cues here: Teddy’s tummy for vowels and consonants are color coded! Phoneme Friends help move across syllables in consonant and vowel configurations, so your students can keep growing in their speech production, too!