Thursday 19 June 2008

Speech

I'm more then a little frustrated with speech therapy lately.

I been basically told that I'd be wasting my time and money getting private speech therapy for Ashley. Her CDA and SLP both prefer to wait and see but I badly feel the speech areas of her brain needs to be stimulated. Sooner the better i would think. I'm not an expert at any of this but i know she can learn and I have tons of faith in her.

She stares at your month when your talking to her and while working on sounds she moves her lips to the correct positions very nicely and this week was able to make the "mmm" sound we were working on it. Her CDA therapist was pleased and noted it down but still maintained her coming once monthly would be plenty of therapy for Ashley.

If we waited for her to step before i got her the treadmill we could still be waiting. I just want to learn what speech therapist do so I can have a successful home routine and I'm not ready to give up or wait around forever either. It also sucks that you age out of the government speech program at 4 1/2 years too and many kids age out before they are ready for blocks of speech. Just letting off steam I guess.. as i've already written to my MPP and still need to get this off my chest some more. I guess if Ashley is working so hard at learning to talk and walk I can learn how to really complain and be heard. That I'll be working on. As well as hiring the best SLP i can find.

3 comments:

Melissa Miller said...

I understand how frustrated you are feeling. You should be. Communication is a huge and incredibly necessary part of the human experience. After three years I'd want to be having full conversations with my little one, not just working on 'mmm.'
I would want to know what scientific evidence supports such infrequent intervention. I doubt there is any. I suspect, as you do, that limited funding is the real reason. Keep fighting until she can fight for herself.

Sherry C said...

Thanks M. I can always count on you to understand. I just can't figure out which SLP to hire I seen one who was very pricy and spoke to two others on the phone and i'm not sure i found the right person yet.

Jenny said...

That sounds so frustrating! I think you are totally doing the right thing by looking into additional speech therapy. And if you're spending the money, don't feel bad about interviewing several different ones to find the best fit.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog! I'm not sure how much you got to read, but my son just started making sounds and "words" around age 3. The best speech exercise by far for him has been to encourage him to say what he could already say. So, at first all he could make were vowel sounds. So the therapist would focus on saying "Ahh", "Ooo", "Oh", and then trying to get him to repeat each one as she said it. Once he got the idea, she started adding consanants to the beginning. (Note: this didn't happen right away, but over time he caught on.) He seemed to be able to say "b" the best, so she would try to get him to say "bee", "bay", "boo". And this is the approach that has really helped him. We've now added the letters M, P, D, and G. He can't say all of the sounds, but he's trying. I imagine eventually we'll work on adding ending consanants, too, but we're just taking things one step at a time.

Okay, sorry for the super long comment. I just wanted to share that approach in case it was something you wanted to try.