Guiding Your Child’s Speech Journey: A Parent’s Guide

In my clinical career, I have direct comparisons of parents who were deeply involved in their children’s therapy regimen and those who were not. In almost every case, the parents who were more involved in their child’s speech regimen had the most success.

Here are several tips for how you can be the ideal partner in your child’s therapy process.

Ask Questions – Starting from your child’s initial evaluation through every stage of therapy, don’t be afraid to ask your speech therapist questions. Make sure you understand the recommendations given in your child’s evaluation report. Whenever therapy goals are listed, ask about the rationale behind each goal and the sequence of those goals. Will they target goals individually or several at once?
Inquire about your child’s progress after a few weeks of therapy. What goals is your child most naturally making progress with? What activities are your child most motivated by? And what the discharge plan is.
Your therapist will appreciate your active involvement in the therapy process, even if it seems like micro-managing.
Offer Suggestions – Don’t be afraid to offer suggestions to your therapist. You will defer to your experienced, licensed professional regarding therapy techniques, goal selection, and the key clinical considerations. However, it is essential that your therapist know what brings your child joy. This can include games or activities that motivate your child, their preferred feedback or reinforcement (i.e. after each correct answer or at the end of a block of items), and potential prizes.
Therapy should always be fun and focus on connecting with your child and their interests. Most therapists are well-stocked with games and other reinforcement tokens but, imparting your knowledge of what makes your child tick will pay enormous dividends for their growth.
Practice Makes Perfect – This adage applies in almost every area of speech and language therapy. There’s no need to do more than your family can reasonably take on. However, research strongly suggests that frequent short home-based “sessions” are the ideal way to pursue follow-up exercises.
For example, three to four times per week for ten to fifteen minutes per session. Definitely take your therapist’s lead and refrain from doing activities or exercises that aren’t “assigned” by your therapist.
When in doubt, ask for direction or clarification from your therapist.
It’s a Process – Speech and language therapy isn’t a linear process. I’ve seen early strong progress turn to mid-therapy frustration and vice versa. I’ve seen minimal early progress give way to rapid change just as everyone was throwing their hands up in frustration. The lesson here is it’s probably prudent to expect at least several months of visits, depending on the nature and number of goals on your child’s therapy plan.

Speech and language are complex behaviors that can require time, persistence, and thoughtful intervention to change. In many cases, there’s simply no way around this. By following the guidelines I’ve provided, you can make therapy more efficient and ensure a positive experience for your family.

Visit our website at speechbuddies.com or contact us for more information.

We also offer a free directory, Speech Buddies Connect, of SLP’s on our website.

By Gordy Rogers, M.S. CCC-SLP

Keeping the Momentum In Your Child’s Speech Plan During The Summer

by Gordy Rogers, M.S. CCC-SLP Parents' Corner Speech Therapy for Kids Speech Therapy Ideas

Ahhh summer. The time of year when your child’s speech plan is interrupted because of camp and family vacations. As much as our kids deserve a break from their academic routine, pausing can affect your child’s momentum toward his/her speech goals.

Speech Buddies® can maintain and progress speech skills over the summer, regardless of the learning phase or service provider.

Phases of speech development:

1. The Establishment Phase – With the help of his/her therapist the child is learning to unlearn previous patterns of speech production. If your child is in this phase, it’s crucial to include frequent practice sessions with the Speech Buddies tools. By feeling the correct placement of the tongue in a variety of speech contexts, summer practice with Speech Buddies can be directed, effective and very efficient. Just five to ten minutes per day is beneficial.

2. The Generalization Phase – In this phase, the sound has already been established, but your child still requires these new speech skills to become a habit in everyday speech.

Our tools help orient your child’s entire sound system to the proper placement and movement of the challenge sound (s). We offer carefully developed supplementary materials to support your home-based programming. Find our free lesson plans here.

Applying a framework like Speech Buddies can provide structure and direction to your home-based work with your child; just getting going and sticking with a program is half the battle.

Kids deserve their summers to explore, to experiment, and unwind. Yet, with Speech Buddies, summers can also be a time of growth through practice without it feeling like work.

Visit our website or contact us to help with your family’s summer speech program!

Making the Most of Your School-Based Speech Services

by Gordy Rogers, M.S. CCC-SLP Parents' Corner School Speech and Hearing Disorders Speech Therapy Techniques

Congratulations! You’ve made it off a waiting list for school-based speech therapy services for your child. Through no fault of their own, many school districts provide speech therapy in groups of three to five children – in some states, the legal maximum can be six.

You’re grateful for the chance to have the support for your child’s speech challenges, but may feel that it could be challenging to address your child’s specific speech challenge efficiently in a group of other children who also have their own very specific challenges and goals.

As a speech pathologist who has worked in both schools and in private practice, I emphasize supplementing your school-based services with home-based work to help your child reach their speech goals.

School-based speech pathologists are dedicated and passionate professionals. They’re not only educators but also pillars of the communities they serve.

However, they’re often faced with huge caseloads that prevent them from going that “extra mile” for your child. That’s why it is critical for parents to be empowered to support their own child’s speech journey directly.

Speech Buddies provide a solution to do that in two key ways:

1) They provide a specially designed and clinically proven way to cue your child to place and move his/her tongue exactly as it should for those hard-to-learn speech sounds that develop in late pre-kindergarten and early school years (e.g. R, L, SH, CH and S)

2) They come with actionable support and learning plans that empower you to be the most effective partner in your child’s therapy process.

Each speech sound requires your child to place the tongue specifically within the mouth. For example, with the commonly disarticulated S sound, if they place the tongue too far back or too far forward in their mouth, the S won’t come out right.

Using a hand-held delivery mechanism, the S Speech Buddy provides a clear and consistent target within the mouth for your child to hit each time. In many cases, Speech Buddies provide that “aha!” moment early in the therapy process, where your child just gets it.

This can be enormously motivating for your child and for you, and is the first crucial step toward remediating a speech challenge.

But, because your child has said that speech sound in the old, incorrect way literally hundreds of thousands of times in his or her young life, it’s essential you follow up with diligent practice so this new, correct way of speaking can quickly become habit.

We know that school-based group therapy essentially means that your child gets 5 to 10 minutes of directed attention for his or her specific speech goals. Speech Buddies tools come with a comprehensive lesson plan to help support your child.

Speech pathologists welcome parent involvement, but school-based therapists can’t give 50-70 parents a home lesson plan each week. Our lesson plans provide a clear roadmap for success and help make your child’s speech pathologist’s job easier.

If your child is in a group of three at school and is in two 30-minute speech sessions per week, your child is really getting 20-minutes of directed speech therapy per week. So, even twenty solid minutes of home-based work with your child effectively doubles the practice your child is getting; forty minutes triples this time!

And many studies throughout the field of speech pathology have confirmed that parents can only help their children meet their goals faster.

How To Manage Your Child’s Speech Challenges While On A School Waiting List

by Gordy Rogers, M.S. CCC-SLP Expert Corner Parents' Corner Special Needs Speech delay Speech Therapy for Kids

The Covid pandemic brought an unprecedented staffing challenge across the entire American healthcare system. From hospitals, to outpatient private practices to schools, there aren’t enough speech pathologists to serve the demand for services that further exploded because of lockdowns.

We are seeing research studies come out now that confirm how lockdowns and remote learning set children back in their speech development.

While this might explain why your child hasn’t been receiving the school-based or clinic-based services, it does nothing to allay your concerns as a parent.

But with the help of Speech Buddies®, you can take your child’s speech development into your own hands.

Let me explain.

Speech Buddies are a set of patented, clinically proven hand-held devices that help a child feel correct tongue placement for those most difficult speech sounds that typically develop in late pre-school and early school years.

Since 2007? thousands of speech pathologists and tens of thousands of parents and children have successfully used them. See our testimonials here. Speech Buddies takes the guesswork out of eliciting speech sounds and speed up a child’s acquisitions of these often difficult-to-learn speech sounds.

The elegance of Speech Buddies as a speech therapy solution lies both in its efficacy and flexibility.

We always recommend having your child evaluated and treated by a licensed speech pathologist for a diagnosed speech challenge, especially if you believe your child’s speech challenge may be more than just of mild severity.

But, Speech Buddies may provide a critical bridge to expedited care amid this staffing situation. You may have an “ah ha moment” within the first few minutes of using the device and our extensive library of training videos and lesson plans will give you a head start on your child’s treatment regimen.

Because we specifically designed Speech Buddies tools for each speech sound (please see descriptions of each device: R, S, SH, L, CH), you only need to purchase the device(s) that apply to your child’s situation. So, when you’re finally moved off the waiting list for services, you could be farther along in the therapy process.

Depending on the speech therapy staffing predicament in your local area, Speech Buddies may also offer a fantastic option for those who would opt for out-of-network services, resources permitting, while potentially reducing the overall cost of those services.

Out-of-network providers almost never have extensive waiting lists given very limited or unavailable funding coverage.

You should be able to get in for an evaluation and services without being placed on a waiting list. If Speech Buddies work for your child’s speech treatment regimen, our tools are proven to reduce the time in therapy for certain speech sound disorders. By accessing a key sensory modality in learning, the sense of touch, Speech Buddies can help achieve a quicker learning breakthrough.

Speech Buddies hand-held tool empowers both the parent and child to recreate the speech therapy session in your own home while building confidence and enabling critical parent involvement in therapy. We also offer a free directory, Speech Buddies Connect, of SLP’s on our website.

Parents are powerless over staffing challenges across healthcare services but, you have access the clinically proven options.

Your child’s speech development is important and can be complex. If you ever have questions about Speech Buddies as a specific solution for your child’s situation, please contact us today!

We’re happy to hear your child’s situation and point you toward actionable solutions.

Early language development – how to support your child

by Kendall Davis Language Building Skills Language Development Reading

Literacy (reading) skills are important for a child’s early language development, social communication, and academic success. Before a child can pick up a book and decode the words on a page into something meaningful, they must first develop an understanding of what written language is and how it is used throughout their environment. Logos, signs, and labels may be teaching your child how to read without you even realizing it. Preschoolers also learn early concepts of literacy by watching their caregivers interact with written language. These first steps in learning to read are called emergent literacy skills. While you may already be teaching these skills in your day to day life, here are some other ways we can support literacy.

One important skill for early language development literacy is understanding that sounds can be manipulated in order to become words, which is known as phonological awareness. You can support your preschooler’s phonological awareness by talking about and teaching different speech sounds during shared reading activities.

Another skill that helps support reading is print awareness. When children demonstrate they understand the logos, signs, and labels in their environment have meaning, they are showing they have print awareness. Print awareness also involves holding a book upright and knowing that the words on the page tell a story. Even before they are able to read the words, encouraging your child to follow the words with their finger from left to right while reading to them will support print awareness. It is also beneficial to discuss the physical parts of the book, who is the author and who is the illustrator.

Alphabet knowledge, or the understanding that letters represent sounds and letters can be grouped together to become words, is another skill that we can teach while reading together. There are many children’s books about the alphabet, but you can identify individual letters anywhere and talk about the sound that it makes.

Finally, oral language skills are needed for early language development and reading comprehension. Everytime you engage in conversation with your little ones, you are modeling oral language skills. Teaching new vocabulary is essential for oral language and early reading because while reading teaches vocabulary, some word knowledge is needed in the earliest stages of literacy.

Reading is a valuable skill to have throughout a child’s life that encourages children academically, socially, and creatively. Children who learn to read early on are often more successful than their peers, and reading is also a source of knowledge. Reading also exposes children to new words and language uses. Books teach children about emotions and individual points of view. Appreciation of others thoughts and feelings will help children communicate and build relationships with peers. Of course, reading is also enjoyable and amplifies creativity.

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