The Weekly Review: Week Seventeen

Best Blog Post of the Week

I hate to be repetitive, but All and Sundry appears here again. However, this time she is featured not because she was funny, but because she was brutally honest. It is hard to be honest about a parenting experience you later feel guilty about, but she is. By sharing, she not only makes the rest of us feel less alone about our own questionable parenting moments, but she also got some amazing advice in her comments.

The Weekly Michael

Michael is finally moving from being able to say his name, then spell his name, and then type his name to trying to write his name. He somehow got the idea in his head that writing with an actual pencil on paper was hard and he refused to even try. Now he is working on it because he wants to. It is very cute and watching him succeed and be proud of his own efforts is a lot of fun.

Ava this Week:

A while back Ava felt the need to anounce every red light while we were in the car. If we encountered 6 red lights and 3 stop signs during the trip we would hear "Red light!!!" about 27 times becuase she often needed to anounce each red light (or stop sign) multiple times. That stage, while adorable at first, drove us a bit crazy and thankfully passed.

This week she is anouncing every time the road is bumpy. "Bumpy Mama, bumpy!!!" It is beautifully articulated, and actually still at the adorable stage, but I wonder when hearing "bumpy" 30 times per car ride will start to get annoying?

The Weekly Trip Report

Our trip to Arkansas for the 4th of July / my grandmother's 80th birthday went amazingly well. It has been 6 months since the last time we went on a visit. Those were an important six months of development apparently, because the travel went much more smoothly with a 2 and 3 year old than it did with a 1 and barely 3 year old.

Let's see. Highlights of the trip include:

• 10 total hours of a successful car riding
• first experience with fireworks for the children (Michael loved them. Ava hated them.)
• reconnected with 17 relatives
• watched 5 cousins between the ages of 1 and 3 play together - mine were neither the youngest nor the oldest of the group
• waded in a creek, threw rocks to watch splashes, and caught crawfish in nets to study and then release them
• played in a water park (one of those that is simply a slab of concrete with many jets of water streaming up from the ground)

Unsupervised

There were the sounds of three children laughing, giggling, playing, and talking.

There was the sound of macaroni rattling around which was to be expected given that they were playing in our macaroni sensory bin.

There was the moment early on when I peeked around the corner to see two of the three children actually sitting in the bin together - adorable.

There was the half an hour of completely uninterrupted adult conversation I was able to have with a friend.

There was the sound of three pairs of feet thundering up the stairs as they moved on to another activity.

And then I walked back around that corner and found this...

Totally worth it!

Speech-Language Pathology Topics: Choosing Targets - An Example

Speech-Language Pathologists have lots of tools available to them. One example is picture card sets that focus on a specific sounds like the ones I have been making and sharing here. However, it is not always appropriate to work on a specific sound with a child even when they are having trouble with that sound. That's when the experience and professional judgement of the SLP comes into play. I'll give you an example.

Let's take the final /b/ sound as a example. An SLP has two apraxic children both of whom are struggling with the final /b/ sound. That SLP also has a set of cards that focuses on the final /b/ sound. For Child A, using that card deck would be very appropriate, and for Child B it would not be her best choice. Why?

Child A: Child A is 2 1/2 years old. She isn't really talking at all and has only two "words" in her vocabulary /ma/ for "more" and /da/ for "that" which she uses for everything else. She struggles to even imitate sounds. Through informal assessment, the SLP has determined that /b/ is one of the only sounds that Child A is stimulable for. Child A has an easier time imitating /b/ in final position than in initial position. This would be a perfect time to work on the final /b/ sound and using a final /b/ card deck would be one way to work on it.

Child B: Child B is also 2 1/2 years old. Child B is doing a lot of talking, but it is difficult to understand anything she says because of the high numbers of speech errors. Child B can make most of the early emerging consonant sounds (/p, b, t, d, m, n, h/) and a few of the sounds that tend to emerge next (/s, sh, w/). One of the speech errors that is having the biggest impact on this child's speech is her tendency to leave final consonants off of words. With this child the final /b/ is not going to the the therapist's top priority. She would probably focus on final consonant production using voiceless, early emerging consonants because those specific sounds are the least complex in terms of motor processing. Final /b/ would not be included because it is a voiced sound.

Summary An SLP working with a child who has a severe speech disorder has more potential targets than there is time to work on. The SLP will use her expertise, professional judgement, and assessment of the child's current skill level and needs to determine which targets are most important at any given time.

You might also be interested in the following articles:

Voicing Pairs

Random Example of the Complexity of Motor Planning