First Speech Session Of 1st Grade
So we are off to the races!
School started on September 3rd this year. It was a Tuesday, which is usually a day Char and I go early for speech therapy. BUT we decided to start speech for the year on Thursday, so Charlotte could ride the bus with all her friends. How cute is our bus stop crew??!!
Thursday we started
Charlotte had her kick off speech session with Sharon Shroeder, our speech therapist of three years, after a long summer break. It always makes me take a deep breath of appreciation to receive her post-session summaries.
Good Morning Team Charlotte.
Charlotte blew me away with her comprehension of following directions with temporal concepts. See below:
At the start of therapy, Charlotte had difficulty detecting and identifying /m/. She was noted to respond with /ee/.
Mom note: We always start off with the ling 6 sounds to make sure her equipment is working. She gets to pick some point in the room a bit away from Sharon who covers her mouth with a barrier, so Char can’t see when she is speaking. The Sharon makes a random combo of all the sounds (they range across frequencies) and Char repeats. If you have been doing auditory verbal therapy with your child, you know this is one of the very first things your child learns!
When following temporal directions using "before" and "after", Charlotte was 95% accurate on 10 given opportunities.
Directions are one of those peripheral language components we hearing people take for granted. They are tossed into conversation constantly, but not the true focus of the sentence. Helping Charlotte learn these temporal directions has been an ongoing process for years. She’s starting to toss them into conversations naturally - what a magical moment!
She benefited from one repetition using "after". When working on initial "th" at the word level, Charlotte achieved 70% accuracy on 3.5/5 opportunities. She benefited from modeling on 2 occasions and a prompt on just 1 occasion.
Charlotte mixes up the “th” and “f” sounds. Visual Phonics has been a HUGE help in showing her the difference of the sounds in words. And now that Char is beginning to read, showing her words written out and the Visual Phonics cues is helping her understand so much faster now. The next steps is naturally to integrate into her conversations…
On at least one instance, she reverted to /f/ when transferring the word to the sentence level.
Have a lovely day, ladies.
Hope all of your first weeks of school and speech sessions have been going well. There is no question that routine and structure helps our family.
May you all find the right flow and format to help your kids thrive!!
Always here for thoughts, questions sharing of ideas!