Communication skills are an important part of our everyday life. When people have a difficult time understanding you it can be frustrating. When children have difficulties communicating their wants and needs and understanding questions that are asked by parents or teachers, this can be a challenging time for both the child, their family, and educators. Questions such as “what should we do?” or “let’s wait and see?” and possible thoughts of “they are choosing when they want to listen” or “they choose when they want to talk” are common questions and concerns that parents bring up. When we notice and begin to see an increase in frustration or minimal attempts by a child to communicate, this is a starting point to seek out strategies and techniques from a speech language pathologist. Pediatric speech therapy at Milestone Therapy Group can provide you, as parents, with strategies and techniques that best meet your child’s needs throughout sessions and help decrease frustration for both your child and the family.
What can Speech Language Pathologists work on?
As speech language pathologists, we can work with the production of sounds, we work with words and how we put them together to communicate with others, and we specialize in the evaluation and treatment of communication & related disorders. So what does this all mean? It means, speech language pathologists can help with:
- Fluency: rhythm of our speech, stuttering
- Voice: too loud, too soft, too high, too low
- Understanding What words mean
- Knowing what to say in different social settings
- How to put words together to make sentences
- Articulation: how we make speech sounds using our mouth, lips, tongue.
- Finding alternate ways to communicate through Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC).
- Swallowing difficulties
At Milestone Therapy Group, we have the best children’s speech therapists who provide individualized speech therapy sessions to meet the child’s current goal through a play-based approach. Pediatric speech and language services can start in infancy and continue on up to 18 years of age. For our younger early intervention children, this can include gross motor activities mixed into the sessions to elicit language opportunities such as using a slide (i.e., “go down” “climb up” “fast” “wee” “ready, set, go”) or trampoline (i.e., ‘jump”, “jump high”, “let’s jump”, “jump fast”) or other activities of special interests to engage in during the speech therapy session. Games, interactive activities, and conversations are how we target language and articulation goals for our older children to increase their level of engagement, cooperation, and most importantly to encourage them to continue to work towards their goals.
An important piece of the therapy puzzle, so to speak, is carryover to home. Consistency is important regardless of the goal we have set, which means we want to create a partnership between families and our speech language pathologists to help provide gains in communication skills at home, school, and all environments outside the clinic treatment room. Providing strategies, recommendations and ideas for activities at home and during routine daily activities are an important part to speech therapy. This can include how to continue working on language skills such as “wh” questions, prepositions, listening comprehension, executive functioning; working on requesting and commenting; following directions; communicative intent, and target words such as core language and speech sound productions during daily activities for carryover. The more we can practice the better!
Milestone Therapy Group is committed to providing a supportive and friendly environment for families and children, and we believe in working closely with families to help them understand their child’s needs and support their child’s progress. A multi-disciplinary approach is used between our speech language pathologists and children’s occupational therapists as these therapies are related to help provide support for the child to their strengths and needs. Our team-based approach provides constant communication with one another and assists each other when parents have questions or concerns. Our team of speech language pathologists are dedicated to helping children achieve and reach their speech and language goals.
For more information about our speech therapy services and to schedule an appointment for your child, please contact us. We would be happy to answer any questions you may have.
