First Speech Therapy Session

Alex had his first session of speech therapy today. He was a little nervous at first, so he had me go back with him.

The first thing his therapist Trisha had him do was to go back with her to the closet to find a game to play. He saw that they had "Don't Break the Ice" and said, "My grandma and grandpa have that game!" Of course that was the one he picked. She grabbed some flash cards that she'd need for the session too.

Trisha took us back to the same room where she did the evaluation last week and had Alex climb up in his chair. She asked him to pick out which pile of cards he wanted to work with first and he picked out the one with the ghost on it. So he got to start working on the hard "g" sound. He had a little bit of trouble translating the single sound to words. He would do the sound correctly, but when it came time to put it with words, he would go back to his usual way of saying it, like saying, "doe" for "go". Trisha decided that was going to be too hard for him to start with, so she switched to the "l" sound after she let him work on just doing the g sound for a bit while playing the game he had picked out.

He did pretty well with the letter l sound, but it's more visual, so he could see how he was supposed to do it. They went through the flash cards and then played "Go Fish" with them and practiced saying words with the l sound. After he worked on that sound for a while, they worked a little on the "th" sound, which is another visual one. He can get them pretty well when he pays attention and makes himself do it.

After they worked on that for a bit, she took Alex to another room to have him pick out a game to take home (it's a printed paper with more "l" sounds that we get to help him do).

Alex seemed to enjoy his session. He was pretty wiggly through it and kept tapping his feet and bouncing a bit. When he'd hold still for a minute, he'd say the sounds better, so maybe his hyperactivity is part of his problem with articulation. It will be a while before he says them all right automatically, but I do think it's a good thing we're taking him in now for the speech therapy.