Rehabilitation Specialists, Inc.

My two "Early Communicators" Other than, " When should my child be making this sound? ", the most asked questions about my job are how to get the youngest children speaking more (birth to age 3). First, I have two kiddos of my own in this age range. Second, I love working with little ones and really discovering how children communicate and watching them grow. So, I am really passionate about this subject. Today's post will be some basic information that all parents of small children can incorporate into their daily routines to promote language development. These are general strategies; that is, an SLP can help you to incorporate more routines specific to your child. If you feel that your child is not meeting language milestones, please contact your local early intervention institution (a free government-mandated program). We can also evaluate your child here in our office or help you to find other services. First and foremost, I cannot emphasize the im...

Cueing Strategies For the most crucial part of this topic (in my opinion), we will talk today about how to cue your child for certain sounds. I believe that this is the most crucial part because you will understand more how to make your child successful with speech sounds and give them self-confidence that they can incorporate these sounds into their life! Without further ado, I give you a list of some of the most common cues and strategies I suggest in my practice: Use a mirror for visual feedback. You can practice words in front of a large mirror, or just have a hand-mirror handy while you are doing your fun activities I talked about on Monday! Hand motions to cue how the sound should be made. I cannot make a list of all of the hand motions I use (especially since they change depending on what works for the child!). I can suggest asking your SLP what hand cue they use for certain sounds. Some common ones may be lightly dragging a finger up the arm for /s/ or touching y...

Target Selection Hello to part 2 of this week's topic of articulation therapy. Yesterday, we talked about building rapport to begin working on speech therapy. Today, we will be discussing why and how your SLP chooses which sounds to work on. So, this can get very clinical, but I am not going to “go there” within this blog post. I am just geeky enough that I will talk to anyone about how much the Cycles Approach has been helping out my therapies, and how I prefer many words to just a few personally in my practice, but that’s just too much. What I will do in this section is explain what speech “targets” are and explain a little but about how you can become an active member in helping your SLP determine what sounds would be most beneficial for your child first. So, first, there are a few different ways that speech therapists can determine what sounds to work on first. If your child only has 1-2 sounds in error, it is much easier to decide which sounds to work on. Otherwi...

This past week, I actually had a lot of feedback about this little blog of ours. So, to all of you reading, thank you! Make sure to leave comments below to start further conversation. In one of the bits of feedback, a friend from high school and college shared a story with me about her experience with speech therapy as a child and how she was made to feel very vulnerable, embarrassed, and unsuccessful with her articulation, or speech sound, therapy. She asked if I could share strategies on how to make therapy less traumatic for children and make them motivated for working on their sounds. I loved this idea and thought for a bit about how I wanted to address this issue. I think the three key elements to getting your child a) excited for speech therapy and b) excited to work on sounds with you would be: 1. Rapport 2. Target selection 3. Cueing strategies In order to avoid an extremely long post, I will be breaking this topic into 3 separate posts. So, t...

This blog post has a lot of information in it. What better way to relay a lot of information than…lists? I got most of my information from the book If Your Child Stutters: A Guide For Parents from the Stuttering Foundation. We have several copies at our office that we are willing to lend out. Without further ado, let’s start those lists! What stuttering is not: A bad habit A disease Normal disfluency (which is what everyone experiences at times; not everyone stutters though Caused by neglectful mothers (a theory from the 1970s; thank goodness we have evolved in both psychology and evidence-based practice)  Signs of stuttering: Primary characteristics: Multiple repetitions Whole word repetitions Can-can-can we do that? Part-word repetitions W-w-w-we have donuts! Filler words Um-um-um-um yea, I like going on the slide. Schwa sound Also known as the “uh” sound Unlike a part-word repetition, this distorts the word Muh-muh-muh-mouse  P...