Learning Charms | Charlotte occupational therapy, speech therapy, Mommy and Me, and handwriting tutoring for kids!

 

Your child may benefit from Speech Therapy if

  • They are not meeting the expected developmental milestones during the first 15-24 months of life (i.e., cooing, babbling, producing first word(s), putting two words together to produce phrases and short sentences)
  • They have difficulty coordinating and planning oral motor movements (tongue, lips) to formulate sounds/syllables or have weak oral motor movements (i.e., weak jaw and/or tongue strength)
  • They have articulation difficulties where their speech consists of substitutions ( i.e., “f” for “th,” “w” for “l”), distortions (i.e., the “s” sound may be a lisp or sounds messy), omissions (i.e., the word “cat” is produced “ca.”)
  • They have weaknesses in receptive language skills or the ability to understand language. These difficulties may include the following: following simple directions, identifying spatial and temporal concepts, understanding prepositions, identifying antonyms, synonyms, multiple meaning words, etc.
  • They have weaknesses in expressive language skills or the ability to communicate through words, facial expressions, gestures, or other nonverbal forms. These difficulties may include the following: formulating grammatically correct sentences, expressing relationships between word meaning, vocabulary development/word finding, answering –wh questions, sequencing, etc.
  • They have difficulties in social situations, such as appropriate turn-taking skills, eye-contact, understanding a communication partner’s feelings, introducing and maintaining a topic, etc.
  • They have a limited food repertoire or have a food repertoire that is limited to certain textures, such as puree.
  • They have numerous dysfluencies where they may repeat a sound, word, or phrase before completing a sentence.
  • They have poor vocal quality, such as a hoarse or weak voice as well as vocal nodules.

Importance of speech therapy

Literacy is essential to success in our society. The ability to read and write is highly valued and important for social and economic advancement.


Language problems are a consequence of both reading and writing problems in children and Adolescent. Individuals with reading and writing problems may experience difficulties using language strategically to communicate.

Speech-language pathologists play an important role in the prevention of literacy problems; their goal is to promote opportunities for success in spoken and written language for children with and without communication disorders.

Speech Pathologists also tend to conceive of writing as more of a communicative and conceptual process than one of technical skills. They are knowledgeable in the type of prompting strategies that can help a student formulate ideas, choose words, organize sentences. They also recognize that teaching a single type of syntactic pattern at one time is more likely to produce better written output than teaching the difference between a noun and a verb, and that teaching use of quotation marks is useless for a student who cannot yet put dialogue into his/her narratives. Additionally, as researchers have posited that dyslexia is a developmentally based language disorder, speech pathologists have become more involved in reading intervention. Again, providing intervention in the context of the reading activities required by the curriculum while modeling strategies for classroom teachers, proves to be more effective for students, overall.
 What is Speech Therapy?
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Speech Therapy Evaluation:
Full speech language evaluations typically take 1-2 sessions at 45 minutes each.  Speech language evaluations may include evaluations for developmental speech, articulation, phonics, and  language use.  Speech Language evaluations are written as a narrative including standardized scores, recommendations, treatment frequency/duration (if applicable), and goals and objectives (if applicable).