Posts Tagged by Early Intervention
Should You Be Concerned?
| February 28, 2012 | Posted by Laura under Apraxia Awareness, Early Intervention |
When I first started to be concerned about E’s speech I scoured baby books and the internet to find out how many words she should be able to say at 18 months, 2 years, etc. Later I realized that the number so often quoted in baby books is a minimum not an average. In other words, your child should be able to say at least that many words or you should probably be concerned.
Head on over to Testy Yet Trying to read this mom’s take on this topic. She is another mother of a child with CAS who just happens to also be a speech pathologist. I loved reading what she had to say.
Non-Speech Sounds Part 2
| February 18, 2012 | Posted by Laura under E, Early Intervention, Learning to Read |
I’ve spent the last two days working with E on recognizing non-speech sounds. I’m starting with animals because they are high interest and she is very successful at recognizing a cat’s meow and a dog’s bark. First, I let her practice with Sound Touch and we played the cow’s moo and looked at the pictures of the cows. This is using multisensory learning – vision and hearing. After she played with the app for a while I hid the screen and started making her guess. I started with the dog and cat and eventually sandwiched the cow in between the two or at the end. I’d say she’s getting it right about 80% of the time so we still have some room to grow.
E was not particularly cooperative the first day. When something is difficult for her, like most people, she doesn’t want to do it. We have a sticker chart which is usually pretty motivating but she wasn’t having it yesterday. I bought some mini Oreo cookies which is a big treat for the kids because I never buy them. I had to use these as a motivator. It definitely worked. I hate using food as a motivator, especially unhealthy food so I’ve got to try something else.
E’s OT has suggested having her eat small cut-up pieces of licorice to help with her tactile issues with food. I don’t know if E would even like licorice but I may try this because I can cut them into very small pieces and make them last a long time. I don’t need another morning with her eating 30 tiny Oreo cookies before 9:00 am!
E continued to play with the app on the iPad in the car on the way to pre-school yesteday. She found a zebra (which by the way makes the oddest sound) and I told her that was a zebra. Her response was, “Zebra is like Z (a boy in her class whose name start’s with Z)”.
This is what I was writing about in my previous post where I stated that kids with CAS may have a hodgepodge off skills. E can identify the sound Z makes and recognize it in two words, yet she can’t recognize the noise made by jangling keys. This is why if you are helping your child to develop a more firm foundation in phonemic awareness you need to start at the beginning no matter where the child actually is in school. This way you can identify his or her weaknesses and firm them up.
For anyone reading this whose child can already identify non-speech sounds in isolation, your next step will be to have your child practice identifying them in random sequences, ie., keys, barking, piano. Reading is essentially identifying speech-sounds in random sequences (at least to a beginning reader), so practice this skill at the non-speech sound level.
