Dr Urisha Naidoo Speech-Language Therapy Solutions

14/11/2025

Happy happy to my colleagues and friends. Making a difference one sound, syllable, or word at a time! 💜🧡💛🩷🩵

11/03/2025

New research alert 🚨
Evidence that using expressiveness during reading to your toddlers has a significant impact on their language abilities. Warm up your vocal cords, moms (and dads) and read to your little ones 📚 ❤️

15/06/2024

The school holidays can bring along stress and pressure on parents to keep the kids entertained and busy. However, downtime is really important too. They need time to be bored - this is the space where creativity is born. Enjoy the later starts in the mornings and enjoy being bored ✌🏽

22/04/2024

15/01/2024

It’s back to school time for the little ones!!!
Wishing everyone a happy start to the school year! And we cannot wait to see our speech therapy kiddies back in action for 2024!

23/07/2023

The Discipline of Speech-Language Therapy @ UKZN’s Open Day! Deciding on a career is an exciting time in a person’s life, but I can also be overwhelming. Open days are a wonderful opportunity to get quality information from people in their respective fields to help you make the right choice. Choose a rewarding profession, like speech therapy. Speech therapist make a difference one word at a time! 

19/10/2022

Love this!! ❤️

Praise is the BEST way to motivate children. 👭👫 Here is our guide to making it a super power!
Download all our resources from here https://www.hacw.nhs.uk/childrens-speech-and-language-resources 🌈💙

03/08/2022

03/08/2022

Integrating into social situations: How to help our kids and their communication
Can one believe that Covid restrictions (which dedicated our lives for over two years) have eased to a point of non existence? While we are all getting used to this our kids may be having more difficulty with this transition than expected. Our kids have only had their immediate family around them for a long time so they may need some help integrating into the social space. From my own perspective, something like a family get-together can be quite daunting for the little ones. I get asked questions like “should I wear my mask?”; “who is going to be there?”; “do I know any of the people there?”
So here are my suggestions:
- Take a deep breath and be patient with the little ones as they navigate social situations.
- Answer the questions that they may have. This will help them feel more in control and more secure.
- While travelling to your destination have a general and light conversation about who they can expect to see. If possible show them photos of a few significant people beforehand.
- When you get there, ease them into the social situation by gently introducing family members and friends. Don’t force them to embrace or hug or kiss anyone.
- Be calm and present yourself. Remember they are always watching their parents and grandparents.
- If your little one is brave enough to venture off to play with the other kids, assure them that you are nearby and always available for them.
- Check in with them regularly while they play. They may need a snack, drink or the toilet and might be too shy to ask for help.

I hope that this helps someone out there!
Stay safe and sending love.
Dr Urisha Naidoo

17/05/2022

Now that my little boy is on the cusp of a year old, I thought it appropriate to talk about teaching first words to our babies.
Although each child develops at their own pace, we typically expect a baby to produce one (or two or a few) meaningful words around their first birthday. Babies learn through imitation. I’m going to paraphrase here but ‘speak to your babies as if they were the wisest, kindest, most beautiful and magical humans on earth, for what they believe is what they will become!’ ~ Brooke Hampton.
One year olds need only about 20 mins one-on-one parent-baby interaction time to develop and thrive!
- thank you for this!

03/03/2022

Today is World Book Day - 3rd March 2022 📚📘📕📖📗📙👓❤️💭 One activity that has been shown to support children's early language development is shared book reading (Noble et al., 2020). Research has indicated that shared book reading can support a wide range of early language skills, including vocabulary growth (e.g., Elley, 1989; Farrant & Zubrick, 2011), narrative and conversation skills (e.g., Morrow, 1988; Reese, 1995), print awareness (e.g., Justice & Ezell, 2000, 2004), future reading ability (e.g., Bus et al., 1995), and phonological awareness (e.g., Chow et al., 2008; Lefebvre et al., 2011). There is also evidence that children who are read to regularly in the early years learn language faster, enter school with a larger vocabulary, and become more successful readers at school (Bus et al., 1995).
Today’s READERS become tomorrow’s LEADERS! Happy World Book Day everyone ✌🏽

26/02/2022

Play is so important for our children’s communication, social, motor and cognitive development.
Through play children learn about the world around them. They learn about relationships between people and objects, rules, turn taking, their limitless imagination- it’s a beautiful space to create, grow and learn.