Basketball, Butterfly & A Lizard

Nate's been busy--between school and therapy sessions.  I think because of his great disposition, he's able to handle his schedule in stride!  Here are a couple of short clips from a therapy session this week.

In this first clip he is working on multi-syllabic words.  In order to get him to slow down an annunciate, his therapist uses colored chips to represent each syllable.  Here he's saying the word "watermelon".

Here's "basketball" and "butterfly".  Notice how he zooms through butterfly and says "bu-ter-fy".

In this last clip, he is using the colored chips to represent individual words in the sentence "The lizard is looking for food."  He is still working on verb tenses, so you'll hear him leave of -ing in looking.

Talk Tips for Teachers (and Others)

A great short You Tube video on some handy tips for working with students with Apraxia.

Unintelligible

Nate's language is taking off in leaps and bounds!  Which is great news....except that now that he's taking more risks with language and saying even more things it has become even more difficult to understand him.  I am reassured by his SLP and a post I made on APRAXIA-KIDS Facebook that this is very normal.  Although it's become more difficult to understand him and we are all a little more frustrated with communication (Nate included), he's saying so many more things out of context which is a good thing.  We're moving closer to conversations beyond the typical "I want this or that".

Yesterday he went on a summer school field trip to the aquarium and the conversation went a little something like this:

Me:  Did you have a good time on your trip?  What did you see?

Nate: Ummm....[pause] cab

Me: You saw a crab?  [emphasized the /r/ in crab]

Nate: Uh-huh.   [pause]   A........spider cab.

Me:  Wow, a spider crab?

Nate: He hurt me?  (His question as of late is to ask if different animals or things will hurt him.)

Me:  No, he won't hurt you.

Nate:  [mumbled something like behind] gass (glass)

Me:  Yes, he's behind the glass.

Self-correction

I know it's been quite some time since I've posted any current videos of Nate.  Time has been flying by--I will soon.  We're quickly approaching the end of the school year and looking forward to a break from nearly daily speech therapy.

Nate has been saying and using so many more words!  At times it is still difficult to understand him, but he's able to tell us so much more!  He's finally able to say the long e sound (like the e in me).  It use to come out of his nose!  The therapists had tried working on this sound for a short period of time, but decided to wait.  It seems to have come on its own.  To be honest, it was one that I wasn't sure if he'd every be able to say correctly and there is no way to show someone how to make that particular sound.

Nate's been using his Go Talk more in therapy and we're still still waiting on a larger machine that is able to hold more visuals and recordings.  He is using it to work on sentence structure, to share information with friends, as well as support his language skills.

In class last week, he told one of his teachers, "Spider over here!"  He's even asking more questions.  In one therapy session his SLP was having him talk about things he did over the weekend.  When she told him that she had popcorn, he asked "You watch movie?"

The best part of his latest progress is that he is self-correcting.  Meaning, that at times when he hears himself say something and he hears it isn't a close approximation, he'll say it again.  Last week we were watching Blues Clues and he was imitating something being said on TV.  On his own, he said repeated it, heard that it wasn't quite right and said it again.  And just this morning I was making cinnamon rolls and he asked what was for breakfast?  I told him to look and see and his first attempt at saying cinnamon rolls wasn't quite right, so he said it again on his own.  Words like cinnamon rolls are still quite difficult for him--to get all the positioning and muscles coordinating, but it's huge that he's attempting these words on his own and correcting his own mistakes!

Big Boy

Nate recently turned 5.  He has been excited about it for a couple of months.  Now that he's 5, everything that he does, according to him, is because he is 5.

A few weeks ago we had Nate evaluated for an AAC device (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) device.  He qualified and we have started using a device called the Go Talk.

He's using it to work on grammar.  He communicates his wants and needs perfectly well, but we're working on articles and sentence structure.  We've only been using it for a couple of weeks, but we're hoping that he can work towards using the device to feel more comfortable participating in class activities that require responses.  Maybe he'll even use it for sharing time some day!