Speech Therapy Session

Today was Christian's first speech therapy session. It went MUCH BETTER than I ever expected. He did very well with Allison (his speech therapist) and enjoyed playing with her.

Well, it wasn't necessarily REAL playing by just letting him loose and have at it. It was Allison taking out an activity and getting Christian to use the toy correctly while trying to get him to name parts, movements, actions, wants, needs, etc. Just what ever applied to it. One of the first toys was putting shapes into a puzzle type thing and then putting pegs in holes. We tried to get him to use his signs of please, more, and all done, as well as show him new ones. We are going to work on open, help, and up.

Allison said she is very strict on getting the kids to put toys away before playing with new ones (Yay, because I have been trying to get Christian to do this with his puzzles), as well as not grabbing for toys in her hands. Christian needs to sign or say please/more to get them.

I need to write down the words that he says spontaneously throughout the week and give the list to Allison next week when she comes for the next session. This will help us all get an idea of what he is actually saying and what we can possibly work on. We also need to ask him questions that require an actual answer, not just a Yes or a No. That is too easy for him and we need to help get some words out of him rather than a shake of the head.

And she said that even an attempt of any word is good. If he makes a 'P' sound when we ask him to say apple then he is making some progress. He actually said 'nana' after she left! I was impressed. :)

She also said that his cognitive level was higher than what the report was. I figured this would be the case because Christian had quite the 'tude during his actual evaluation, thus making me worried about today. But he sat right in front of her with her bags of stuff and wanted to dig right in! :)

It wasn't too in depth today. Played with some flashcards to try and get him to say the word of the picture or the sound that it made. Fed, brushed teeth, combed hair, and put Ernie to bed. I would imagine it will get 'harder' as he adds more words. Allison said we will start to work on doing two-word sentences together in the coming weeks.

So here is a list of what we know he says so far, although what actually comes out of his mouth isn't an EXACT match to how us adults say it. ;-) Some of these are on his own, most are prompted.

No
Oh no
Bus
Butterfly
Turtle
Wawa (water)
Where are you? (but it's all one big blurb of a word)
Here you go (again, a big blurb of a word)
Nana (banana)
Woof
Duh (duck)
Oooo (moo)
Bur (bird)
Choo choo (for the train)
Mama
Daddy

That's all that I can think of at the moment. I'll add more later if I can think of them. :)

Looking forward to more sessions!! His next one is the 29th.