Holidays can sometimes be challenging for kids with speech, language, and listening challenges. Here are 5 tips to help your child navigate Valentine’s Day. Read some books about Valentine’s Day Visit your book stash or your local library, and introduce your child to what Valentine’s Day is with a story. Reading a book together will introduce your child to the … Read More
What do Speech Sounds Have to Do with Reading and Writing?
I’ll be honest…when I first started working in the schools as a speech language pathologist (SLP), I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what speech sounds (how you say/pronounce sounds) had to do with reading. I probably would’ve said nothing, and I would have been SO WRONG. Kids with speech sound difficulties, like not being able to say their … Read More
The Mighty Voice Teachers Pay Teachers Store
Being a busy school SLP is still vivid in my memory…you’re late to pick up your next group of kids, you desperately need a bathroom break, and you’re sick of the deck of irregular verb cards you’ve used already 6 times this week. Enter Teachers Pay Teachers. If you’re not familiar, it’s a marketplace where teacher authors post resources they’ve … Read More
Listening Development in the First Year
If you read this post about how typically developing children learn language, you already know the secret sauce…listening. Today I want to share with you some of the listening milestones your child should be hitting between birth and 1 year old. These behaviors can both show you that your child is on track, and also be a sort of “early … Read More
How Do Children Learn to Talk?
I talk a lot on this blog about how to help children who are deaf and hard of hearing to learn spoken language, but have you ever thought about how a typically developing child learns language? Like, how do they go from these tiny little snuggly babies that only cry to 3 or 4 year olds who can talk non-stop? … Read More
Why Mild Hearing Loss Might Not Be Mild at All
This is a copy of the report from my own kiddo’s (17 months old) recent audiology report. I want to share it to help other parents interpret some of this info a little more easily because I think sometimes as parents we interpret the term “mild hearing loss” to mean it’s something that isn’t really significant. But when I read … Read More
How to Get the Information You Need at Medical Appointments
Some of my readers may have seen that I recently took this little guy in to have his hearing evaluated. At 16 months, I realized he’s behind in speech and language, and suspected it might be due to not hearing well. So, I took him in to an audiologist, and sure enough, he is/was having some middle ear issues (likely … Read More
Maybe One of the Nerdiest Things I Do as an SLP Mom
Let’s just put this out there–I am a nerdy mom. And one of my very favorite speech and language “things” to nerd out about is phonological processes. I’ll be driving with my kids, and in my head, try to label all of the phonological processes I hear (nerdy, right?). Phonological processes is basically a big fancy name for how our … Read More
So How Do You Evaluate Speech and Language In a Baby??
This is one of the questions I hear often from parents…if they’re not talking yet, how do you evaluate speech and language skills in a baby? It’s a great question. If you *only* consider talking, of course it wouldn’t make sense to evaluate babies, because, well, for the most part, they aren’t talking yet. But, I wrote about how communication … Read More
I’m a Speech Therapist, and My Baby Needs Speech Therapy
I was on an EHDI (Early Hearing Detection and Intervention) phone call recently and one of the participants talked about how parental guilt can prevent parents from moving forward with treatment…and I’ll be honest, I didn’t really get it. I mean, I thought, well, you just do it. But I was coming from my therapist perspective, where you can step … Read More