“Tan I have a tup?”, “I want some tandy?”, “Tome here.” Sound familiar??? This is called “velar fronting”. These errors occur when a child substitutes a sound produced in the back of the mouth (k/g) with a sound produced in the front of the mouth (t/d). This is a...
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In order to properly celebrate the beginning of the school year I thought I would put together a giveaway. Anyone who begins to FOLLOW my blog between today (August 23rd) and the end of August (August 31st) will receive a FREE digital copy of my “Speech and Language Therapy...
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This is the first official year that I am not going back to work at the school district. I have worked super hard at building up my private practice and have so many clients that I no longer have enough time to work for the district as well. I am...
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1. Kids with Apraxia really NEED my help We are not talking about taking a slight frontal /s/ distortion and making it sound perfect. We are talking about kids who have little to no means of communication. They have extreme difficulty expressing their wants and needs. Such limited verbal...
Read MorePart Seven: Keeping it Functional Throughout my posts I have demonstrated a simple and systematic way to view and treat apraxia of speech. One of the main points of this approach is that you only need to focus on practicing movement patterns and they will generalize to words, phrase,...
Read MorePart Six: A Plug-in for Prosody One of the biggest complaints about kiddos with apraxia is that they sound a little like a computer. Most therapists attribute the computer like voice to a prosody deficit. Prosody – simply defined is when we use stress, inflection, and varied length/rate of...
Read MorePart Five: Choosing Therapy Targets: When I originally began working with apraxic children I often chose therapy targets based on which sounds were easier to produce in isolation. I then targeted those sounds in a variety of syllable shapes based on the research I had done on other apraxia...
Read MorePart Four: The Sustained Phonatory Modeling Technique So based on the theory I have presented (The Movement Pattern Generalization Theory) we may only need to focus therapy on a movement pattern basis (2 pure speech sounds with the movement in-between). This theory is great – but I am sure...
Read MorePart Three: The Movement Pattern Generalization Theory Have I ever mentioned how much I love working with children with Apraxia??? It fills me with a great amount of passion – the kind of passion that leaves me sitting awake quietly at night thinking, pondering, and praying for inspiration and...
Read MorePart Two: What is Apraxia??? Imagine you are driving to a familiar place. A place that you have driven to many times before. Maybe your work or your school. Someplace that you drive to often. Now – think about how much thought you put into your trip to get...
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