Difficulty with the production of speech sounds in kindergarten have been associated with a greater likelihood of reading difficulty. A significant portion of school-age children are estimated to have a speech sound delay or disorder. While a common difficulty, ensuring that your child is acquiring their speech sounds as expected is important. Speech sound errors can significantly impact the academic, social, and emotional success of children.
CommuniKate can assess your child’s speech sounds and patterns to determine whether they are acquiring the sounds as expected for their age or would benefit from intervention to support their development.
While speech sounds can follow a usual developmental pattern, every child is unique. The results of the speech assessment drive the intervention process.
Teaching, cueing, and word selection are strategically designed to allow your child to be successful early in the process. As their confidence and skills increase, the difficulty of the presented practice items increases.
Often students will learn to be successful with their speech goals within syllables before they are able to produce their skill in words, phrases, sentences, reading and conversational tasks.
Therapy is designed with efficiency and success in mind. Often targeting the development of one sound or pattern will result in other sound errors resolving with minimal intervention.
Within your child’s CommuniKate visit, strategies for success are taught, practiced, and reinforced. Follow up activities are provided to generalize our learning to other activities. Personalized YouTube videos can be provided to help your child remember their strategies and offer a model during home practice.
Children’s abilities to learn and interact with their world are often directly linked to their language skills. However, the development of your child’s language system is a complex process. When a child is having difficulty acquiring language it often impacts other facets of their development. These difficulties can often make themselves known with frustration, emotional outbursts, excessive shyness and academic difficulties.
Language is often divided into two components: comprehension (receptive language) and production (expressive language).
Receptive Language
-following directions
-answering questions
-vocabulary
-understanding language of others
Expressive Language
-vocabulary
-grammar
-describing objects or events in a way that makes sense to others
CommuniKate can thoroughly assess your child’s language development and determine whether they are acquiring their language milestones as expected. Errors are analyzed to support the development of the most effective and efficient intervention strategies.
Early language intervention is critical. Your child’s brain is growing extremely fast and its capacity to learn new skills is greater than it will ever be. As your child grows, their reliance on language to learn and navigate their word increases. Difficulties with language can impact attention, concentration, literacy, social skills, participation, academic achievement, and fluency of speech.
The language assessment informs the intervention plan. Therapy is individualized and designed to support the profile of language skills needed for your child. Focus may be on improving their ability to share their experiences by telling stories, answering questions, expressing their wants and needs, using grammatically appropriate words, increasing their vocabulary, following directions or understanding the content within their classroom setting.
Your child’s CommuniKate visit is one component of their therapy. Targeted teaching, strategies and practice activities are introduced with opportunities for success, praise and reinforcement built in. Follow up activities are provided to generalize our learning to their other activities. Personalized YouTube videos are often provided to help your child remember and follow along with their strategies during home practice.
Whether your child is getting ready to start kindergarten or is beginning to have difficulty with reading/writing, ensuring their speech, language and pre-literacy skills are ready for the classroom can support a smooth academic transition. Pre-literacy skills are the building blocks of many academic activities.
CommuniKate can offer a pre-literacy assessment which includes key areas of phonological (word, syllable, sound and rhyme) and phonemic (the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words) awareness, speech sounds, oral language, vocabulary and listening comprehension. While these skills continue to develop throughout their elementary years, a rich foundation will support the efficiency of their learning. Results are analyzed to guide the selection of the most effective intervention strategies.
Intervention to target the acquisition of developmentally appropriate pre-literacy skills, language development and speech sounds can improve the efficiency and success of your child’s school experience. Targeted teaching, strategies and practice activities can be provided to support Storytime, play activities, reading, homework and home-based routines. Direct intervention can be offered to support the development of individual skills. Personalized YouTube videos are often provided to help your child remember and follow along with their strategies during home practice.