The Weekly Review: Week 35

Favorite Blog Quote this Week

I identify strongly with the following quote from this post: "Children are wonderfully wonderful but they are also bottomless gulleys of sucking need..."

The Weekly Procrastination Update

With the 2 additional hours of CEUs I managed to get this week I now need 10 more in the next 12 days... Hmm. I don't seem to be gaining on this situation.

The Weekly Celebration

Four years ago, in the wee hours of the morning, following 19 hours of labor, we welcomed our 8 pound, 6 ounce firstborn into this world. We joined all the other parents who have experienced this profound transformation.

In the four years since then he has grown from a helpless (and rather incessantly noisy) infant to an amazing young boy (still incessantly talking). He loves cars, tools, building things, fixing things, and destroying things. He loves petting a kitten and watching her purr. He takes pride in being a big brother and loves his sister's company. He can read three-letter words, write his name, and will listen happily to any story. He carries a tune nicely and loves to sing for an audience or just to himself. He began preschool this year and is doing amazingly well there.

I am simultaneously excited about what the next year will bring, intimidated by the challenges it will hold, sad at how fast the time will go by, and curious about the little boy he will be when he turns five. Raising a child is such an adventure.

Ava this Week

Twice a year, we have parent conferences at Ava's preschool. They use a checklist of skills and write (N-not demonstrating, S-sometimes, A-Always) next to each item. 6 months ago Ava's sheet was full of Ns and Ss. This time almost everything was an A - even in the communication section. The combination of speech services, OT services, and preschool has been so powerful.

The Weekly Michael

This is really the first year Michael has fully understood what a birth day means and what birthday celebrations are about. We've been celebrating off and on all week. First his grandparents came into town and we had his party. Yesterday they did some special things at school. Tonight we will give him our gift, a gift from his godmother, and his gift from his other set of grandparents. He has been so mature about all of it. He is excited, but not crazy over-excited. He's been grateful, polite, and appropriately thankful when receiving gifts. He's been good about sharing with his sister. All in all, I've been struck by what a sweet, mature new 4 year old he is. It's been a wonderful (and busy) week.

Stimulability from a New Perspective

As I was taking a course dutifully working towards earning my 15 continuing education credits for this year I came across an interesting article that reminded me of several concepts in articulation/phonology treatment that I hadn't had time to think about recently.

In a nutshell, I was taught to address the error sounds a child is stimulable for first. That seems to make sense. In theory they would make progress faster and with less frustration than with sounds that are harder for them.

The article I read claimed that more recent research (I have not had time to look up the source articles yet, so take this with a grain of salt until I can confirm.) shows that often, children will acquire the sounds they are stimulable for on their own given time. Therefore, time in therapy should be spent on the sounds they are least stimulable for. If you spend 3 months establishing and working on /k/ and in the meantime, the /t/ which they were stimulable for pops in on its own, the child now has some mastery of two sounds at the end of that time period instead of just one.

This therapist chooses two targets to work on with a child at any given time. She chooses the two most complex sounds the child is not stimulable for that have the most contrast (voicing, manner, place). This is an entirely different model of choosing targets than I was taught to use, but the idea is intriguing.

I have two questions for any readers that might want to discuss this:

1. Have you encountered this approach to articulation/phonology therapy before, and what do you think?
2. If you agree that this approach has merit, do you think that this approach also applies to children with motor planning problems (apraxia)?

The problem with making assumptions about therapy materials.

I bought a therapy resource that was designed specifically to target early emerging sounds. Even better, the resource stated that it included 100 words per phoneme (20 one-syllable initial, 20 two-syllable initial, 20 two-syllable medial, 20 one-syllable final, and 20 two-syllable final). I thought to myself, "Why did I spend all that time designing my own early-emerging sounds card sets? There was already something out there!"

Well, I pulled it out the other day and excitedly flipped to the one-syllable final /p/ words to use with Ava. It was new. It was colorful. It was a spiral bound book that stands up like an easel. It was new and shiny. I had high hopes. There were 20 one-syllable final /p/ words. They were easy to find, and Ava was interested. However, I was able to use only 8 of those. I was so disappointed. Let's take a look at why.

First I had to eliminate all the words with blends (CCVC). That eliminated 6 words (stop, sweep, clap, step, scope, and grape). Then I had to eliminate the 6 words that began with phonemes that were too difficult for her (cup, cap, chip, drape, cop, and rope). That left me with 8 (soap, type, ape, top, shop, ship, map, and soup).

Of those 8 words, two began with /s/ and two began with /sh/. If your client is having difficulty with those phonemes you would be left with only 4 words to work on.

(If I apply these same criteria to my own final /p/ card set I am able to use 24 of the 30 picture cards in the set. I have to eliminate the 4 that begin with /k/ and the 1 /l/ and the 1 /r/.)

I encountered similar problems with the other one-syllable words. If you are going to design a set of cards designed to target early emerging sounds, it is not actually helpful to have so many of the words include sounds that emerge late or words that include more complex syllable shapes.

I suppose the moral of the story is to try to get a good look at the actual word lists in the materials you are about to spend your limited resources on. It is definitely possible that when you get a good look at what is included the set may not meet your needs.

Visual Aid:

1. cup
2. soap
3. cap
4. stop
5. type
6. chip
7. sweep
8. clap
9. step
10. scope
11. ape
12. drape
13. top
14. cop
15. shop
16. rope
17. ship
18. map
19. grape
20. soup

Try it for yourself. How many of these words would you actually be able to expect your child/client to produce accurately?