Signs Your Child May Need Extra Learning Support
Every child learns at their own pace, but sometimes, they struggle…
Parents become concerned when their young baby doesn’t seem to be developing on time and according to the expected developmental milestones. Early intervention for nursery school children and young toddlers is important and speech therapy should be considered when a child is not developing on time. At Catch Up Kids we work in collaboration with other therapists on the child’s team to tackle their developmental delay and help them achieve deficit skills. If the child has a speech therapist or occupational therapist that has been enrolled by the parents we work together to bridge the gaps. Over the years we have partnered with many speech therapists who provide the children with various interventions to help them including speech therapy.
When a child is not communicating the first step is to establish if imitation is possible for the individual in question. Imitation is the foundation of all social behaviour and of vocal communication. A young developing child of ten months can imitate wave bye bye or clap hands.
From here they move to imitation with objects. If I push a car the toddler should be able to imitate my action and push the car. If I bang a drum the toddler should be able to imitate my action and also bang the drum and so on. Two year olds learn from their environment because they imitate their peers. One of the targets during speech therapy would be to teach the toddler to imitate because if a toddler cant imitate a gross motor action or imitate an action with a object they will struggle to imitate vocal sounds and words. Repetitively practising imitation skills in speech therapy is important before the child will be able to communicate and confidently interact.
An assessment by a speech therapist enrolled by the parents would include identifying areas in which the child is either not developing at the same level as children their age or have significant difficulties that impact their functioning in daily life. Subsequently, children attend speech therapy sessions to work on goals targeted to their varying needs.
The speech therapist will create communication opportunities for your child to encourage their language development. You may also engineer opportunities for your child to motivate them to interact and communicate. A speech therapist will also work on improving the child’s communication skills when conducting speech therapy. As mentioned earlier, children mand ie request for their needs. This is the first level of language development. Next comes tacting which means they draw attention to things in the environment like look there is a dog barking or they point to an aeroplane flying over. Speech therapy will target the number of times a child tacts in order to catch up delay in language development. After tacting children develop the skill of asking questions. What is it? Where is Daddy? How can I make a clay lion? are question words speech therapy will target once manding and tacting is in place. The big question is WHY? Why is the sky blue or why cant I have a biscuit for example. The why question will be incorporated into a program when speech therapy is provided as this is an important question for a child’s language development. In order for the child to ask why questions there are pre requisite skills including understanding sequencing, concepts like before and after, as well as, if and then and cause and effect. All these concepts will be included in a speech therapy program once the child is ready and has the necessary pre requisite skills in place.
There are several ways in which you can support your child’s language and speech development. Setting aside time to read books and follow recommendations make in speech therapy will increase the number of times the child is exposed to practising the targets and inevitably their language development will improve. At Catch Up Kids we support the children’s development and help them catch up.
Every child learns at their own pace, but sometimes, they struggle…