Speech therapist for child
Speech therapist for child
What is speech therapy?
Speech therapist for child is an intervention that focuses on improving a child’s speech and ability to understand language, this includes non-verbal language. Speech therapy includes two components one, coordinating the mouth to produce sounds to form words and sentences, two: Understanding and expressing language.
My Child and speech therapy
Speech therapist for child: Although some children may have excellent pronunciation and may even be early readers, they may need speech therapy to improve Pragmatic language, or the process of using verbal and body language appropriately in social situations. Speech Therapist may also improve the child’s quality of life by teaching children how make requests using language, having conversations and making friends.
Speech disorders and language disorders
Speech disorders include; Articulation (difficulty producing sound) Fluency (problems such as stuttering) resonance (problems with voice pitch and quality) disorders.
Language Disorders include; Receptive (difficulties understanding) Expressive (difficulties putting words together) disorders and cognitive communication which is the difficulty with communication skills.
How we work on language and speech?
At Catch Up Kids each child’s program is developed to cater to their individual needs. One of the major curriculums in which we put much emphasis and great importance is language, whether a child is vocal or non-vocal language particularly speech and ways of communicating for the child is focused on.
One of the methods we use to improve child’s speech includes the incorporation of prompt in the child program. PROMPT ( Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets) is a tactile-kinesthetic approach to speech therapy which means that we use touch cues on child’s face (jaws, lips and tongue) to support and shape correct movements. Through the specialized physical cues provided by our highly trained therapist we are able to guide the child through syllables and words. The hands-on approach assists the child to plan, coordinate and produce speech sounds. This is then faded as the child’s speech productions develops.
There have been many cases at Catch Up Kids where children enter our program with impaired speech; this could range from a child only having one sound and no other speech abilities to a child who has excellent speech but poor pronunciation but through the use of prompt we see a child fully develop to a level of other children in the same age.
Other methods in which we encourage communication include manding and tacting. This is a language skill we focus on to improve child’s ability to communicate their needs. Studies have shown that typically developing children ask no less than 300 questions a day, we always strive to have any child who comes into our program on the same level as peers in the same age group thus we put much emphasis on children being able to ask and have their needs met. Tacting is where we work on conversational skills and this is important in school so that they are able to communicate with educators, peers and be able to maintain their friendships.
