eSpecially Ben

Although this little King has not won an Award just yet, he is still a winner in our house. On Monday, Ben's speech therapist, Kenyatt, came in from after his session with Ben to tell us a few things: 1. Ben is making the "H" sound 3 out of 4 times. 2. Ben made the "M" sound one time. 3. Ben understands that he has to do certain things to make these sounds. He gets the concept. You can jump for joy now. Kenyatt has been using Prompt Therapy with Ben for awhile now. From what I understand of the program, Kenyatt touches Ben's face in specific places for certain sounds to be made. It cues (or prompts) Ben to make the sound. My mom and I have tried to get Ben to make the "H" sound using Kenyatt's technique on several occasions and it has worked. What does this mean? For me, it means that Ben understands communication. Kenyatt will continue with the therapy and try to increase sounds and shape them into words. The first word he will try ...

Sean is 2 1/2 and his speech is okay, but not great. Probably in time, it would all come together, perhaps needing speech when he reached Kindergarten. But with information and resources at our fingertips, we had his speech tested. As expected, his expressive and receptive language scores were good. Sean's score on the articulation test was  concerning. This was not a surprise because he leaves off the final consonant on most words - Ben is 'Be', Chair is 'Cha' and so on. Another concern is using correct sounds for words. Car sounds like 'Har'. Ben's speech therapist, Kenyatt, can come early and see Sean at our home before Ben's appointment. Sean is very familiar with Kenyatt, and I have introduced the idea to Sean as "his turn" to work with Kenyatt.  When I have tried to show Sean how to make a specific sound, he is eager to learn and tries to move his mouth and tongue to make the sounds. I am glad we have caught this early. I belie...

I get a report about Ben's progress almost 6 times a week from each of the therapists, after every session. Most of it is mundane information about what they did, how well the session went, how hard Ben worked, how hard Ben worked them, what equipment may need to be fixed, etc. But today, although the setting was the same and the speech therapist was giving his report as usual - he seemed to be saying something new. Or perhaps I was hearing it differently. Basically he said, Ben knows his name - he can identify it. There is no need to work on that goal. Well, I knew that from Ben's IEP meeting in January, but it was good to hear from an outside source that this was, in fact, true information. The speech therapist also said that Ben has met the goal to identify articles of clothing (shoes, socks, pants, shirt) from both pictures and actual items. Then he said Ben knows his numbers, 0-9. His next step was to help Ben learn his colors. The therapist said that when Ben pays a...