Rank: Newbie
Joined: 9/3/2010
Posts: 1
Points: 3
Location: Alberta
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I have two children, my older child is turning three and has been assessed as having a severe expressive delay and moderate receptive delay. He was born at 35 weeks gestation, and the pediatrician in the ICN notified us to be on the lookout for this and other delays as they are common in premi babies born before 36 weeks.
He has developed normally in all other respects. We have done an extensive amount of early intervention with him. We started at two with a local program put on by Capital Health called Play and Say where once a month we would go and in a group of 2-3 children work with two speech pathologists through play, songs and stories. He did expand his vocabulary somewhat, though mostly only we could understand. He is now in a program that the speech pathologist referred us to through the public school system. He goes to school 5 days a week for 2.5 hours and is in a class of 10 kids with a teacher, SLP, assistant SLP and an occupational therapist. The program is September through June and he can be enrolled up to three years. We are hopeful for him to progress quickly in this program. They do an IPP at the start of the year and we meet with the classroom staff on a monthly basis as well as working on the strategies going on in the classroom at home.
One concern I have that seems to not concern anyone else is how he speaks. When he talks he will truncate his words - so cat is ka or cookie is key. It is almost all his words he leaves either the first or last part off of. What sort of things can we do to help with this? Right now we say things like "cookie, you want a COOkie" accentuating the full word for him. My other concern is he changes word order, so if he is wanting assistance with something and we say "help Please" it always comes back as "pee hep"(please help) or "puppy go out" he repeats back as "ou go pu-ee"(out go puppy). Should we be concerned about this?
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Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 1/22/2008
Posts: 737
Points: 1,947
Location: Colorado
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Hi Minny,
I regret to see you have not had a reply yet to your excellent post. I think the lack of response is due to the end of summer, the beginning of the school year, and, in my case, being involved in some significant family health matters.
I am so impressed by the program you described in terms of time and service provision. It sounds excellent.
From my point of view as an SLP, I definitely like to address the speech production and language production issues you described. What your examples share is sequencing difficulty. I think it is very helpful to a child when he is given support and assistance to add those ending consonant sounds and to include all syllables in words. You are approaching his needs well by emphasizing the missing syllables as in COOkie. You might consider some routine "pattern practice" staying with one "lesson" at a time. For example, choose about 10 simple and practical words that end with "t"[hat, bat, cat, bite, sit, boat, boot, ...], make picture cards for each, and practice those until he "gets" them, then choose another sound such as "p". Practice the "t" by itself first (be sure to say the voice-off "t" and not the voiced "tuh"--it makes a difference.) Then start one of the practice words, stretching out the vowel to "buy some planning time" before adding the "t" at the end. Encourage your son to join in (unison production) and then add the "t" as soon as he has started the word and caught up to your vowel production.
I have written some prior posts about this (how I add printed letters below the pictures and add some extra clues) so you may want to search for articles I have written on this site.
Do ask your SLP if she will give you more suggestions for working on sound sequencing in words and word sequencing in phrases and sentences. I think you are right to want to address his needs in these areas.
Best wishes,
Mary Lou
Mary Lou B. Johnson, M.S.,CCC-SLP
http://www.helpyourchildspeak.com
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