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What can speech therapy look like at MCSLP?
The Many Ways to Communicate
Mr. X is working on expanding his social communication and requesting using total communication methods including his speech generating device, American Sign Language, vocalizations, and gestures.
Total communication provides communication support through verbal and other modalities, such as visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile awareness. This approach has proven to be extremely beneficial for X's expressive and receptive communication growth. Total communication is used consistently across environments by his supportive team members. Here, you can see and hear X's Mom and see his school behavioral support staff supporting and reacting to all communication. It takes a village!
The Importance of Following a Child's Lead
When kiddos provide such clear communication about their interests, why wouldn't I follow their lead? Child led treatment sessions are so much more fun and effective!
Miss R and I started with a Halloween theme to target her "s" productions. She picked her words from the monster's belly to practice, pop into an egg, and send down the tube.
That was until she discovered that the monster ate one of her absolute FAVORITE things...a dinoSaur!
With a quick adjustment of activity, we rolled with this motivating word and later dug a dinosaur out of an egg. Adapting session plans quickly to match interests leads to independent involvement along with higher frequency of practicing our target sounds!
Miss R was on board for turning into an expert paleontologist and went home with a new friend!
Bring More Play Into Your Day
If I am making pediatric language therapy functional, meaningful, motivating, and exciting, I believe it SHOULD resemble “just play”. Below, I’m eager to share what my speech therapist mind is actually focusing on while “playing”.
Skills needed for language:
- Joint attention (focusing on the same activity)
- Motor imitation (banging items together, putting on head)
- Imitation of speech sounds and words
- Comprehension of spoken words (body parts, prepositions)
Provided fitting supports to encourage and expand language by using:
- Repetitive play at her level (sitting face to face, “Up-up-up”)
- Observe and wait: be quiet, encourage spontaneous imitation!
- Motor actions paired with language (“Boom boom!”)
- Expansion of language (“Peek-a-boo, I see you!”)
- Language modeling (“On my head!”)
- Narrating INSTEAD of asking questions ("On my head" vs. “Is this my head?”, “Can you say head?”)
See What Our Clients Say!
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