Speech therapy and speech therapists
Speech therapy and speech therapists
When should a parent consider intervention such as speech therapy?
Speech therapy is often recommended when your child struggles with one or more of the following areas:
- Receptive language: This is the ability to understand words and language. This involves gaining information and meaning from routine, visual information within our environment, sounds and words, concepts such as size, shape, colours and time, grammar and written information. Receptive language plays an important role in the ability to successfully communicate. Children who have receptive understanding difficulties may find it challenging to follow instructions at home or at school. They might not respond appropriately to questions or requests. In a school setting, difficulties in receptive understanding may lead to inattention, listening difficulties or behavioural problems. As well as difficulty in participating in activities and academic tasks.
- Expressive language: This is the use of words, sentences, gestures and writing to convey meaning and messages to others. Expressive language skills include being able to label objects or actions, describe events, using words in a sentence, using correct grammar, telling and retelling stories, writing stories and responding to questions.
Expressive language gives children the ability to be able to express their wants and needs, thoughts and ideas, ability to reason, write and interact with peers.
- Mechanics of producing words: This refers to articulation, pitch, fluency, and volume: The ability to produce words with age appropriate articulation, pitch, fluency and volume.
- Dyslexia: This refers to reading accurately and fluently. Children with dyslexia may have trouble answering questions about something they’ve read. But when it’s read to them, they may have no difficulty at all. This includes difficulty with tasks such as reading due to decoding difficulties and phonemic awareness, comprehension, spelling, writing and mathematics
- Dyspraxia: This causes difficulties in activities requiring movement and coordination.
- Dysgraphia: Dysgraphia is a condition that causes trouble with written expression.
- Auditory processing disorder: This is a condition that makes it hard for children to recognize subtle differences between sounds in words. It affects their ability to process what other people are saying. Here are the signs of auditory processing disorder: auditory discrimination, auditory figure-ground discrimination, auditory memory, auditory sequencing
When looking for speech therapy services it is important to remember that the more intensity in terms of hours you do the faster the problem area can be addressed and resolved. When looking for speech therapy services or a speech therapist it is also beneficial to look at the services Catch Up Kids provides as these areas and much more can be addressed:
Catch Up Kids and Speech therapy and speech therapists
Catch up kids can assess a child across various domains, determine the cause and develop an action plan to help build on these skills through 1:1 individualized treatment programmes such as (but not limited to):
- Articulation problems: Not speaking clearly and making errors in sounds.
- Fluency problems: Trouble with the flow of speech, such as stuttering.
- Mechanics of speech
- Reading and spelling
- Resonance or prosody problems: voice pitch, volume and quality.
- Oral feeding problems: Difficulty with eating, swallowing and drooling.
Not only does catch up kids focus on the areas explained above it also addresses the building blocks required for the development of these skills as well as areas of development affected by this, such as:
- Executive Functioning skills: Attention and concentration, memory, planning, problem solving and self-management strategies: By teaching a child to sustain their attention, continuing with activities without distraction and being able to finish a task.
- Cognition skills: This refers to the development and understanding of a child’s mental states in himself or herself and others, such as one’s thoughts, beliefs, emotions etc.
- Social skills: This area develops a child’s social interactions, social language skills, self-esteem and group related skills. Such as a child’s ability to engage in reciprocal interaction with peers, initiating sustaining and maintaining conversations, to compromise with others, and be able to recognize and follow social norms and rules.
- Play skills: to develop a variety of age appropriate play skills such as peer play, independent play, constructive play, pretend play etc.
- Language skills: Receptive language: To develop an understanding of language and following instructions. Expressive language: to be able to communicate effectively Pragmatics: The way language is used within social situations.
- Motor skills: to develop visual, oral, gross and fine motor skills needed to participate in daily living activities and academic skills
- Academic skills: to develop a wide range of language arts, mathematics skills and the ability to independently participate in and complete academic tasks at school
- Challenging behavior: often challenging behavior occurs due to a child being frustrated for ex due to being misunderstood and this can be addressed through behavior intervention plans that will address and decrease these challenging behaviours.
- Sensory processing: organizing a child’s sensory system by helping them regulate it within their environment
Referrals are commonly made to speech therapy and speech therapists, because those are the recommendations teachers and doctors are trained to make, and behavior analysis – while a widespread field in international circuits, is still growing its sterling reputation in South Africa. ABA helps a child with these difficulties and is important to strengthen and develop a child’s ability to: engage effectively in a classroom, communicate appropriately with their peers and adults, to improve the understanding and responses, improve reading and writing skills and essentially improving a child’s self esteem by setting a child up for success.
