Sunday, October 18, 2009

Auditory Verbal Therapy - The Hear Center - October 6, 2009 (Ella Marie 5 months and 1 week old)

Today we had our auditory verbal speech therapy session in Birmingham. We are grateful to Kelli who has given us exercises/activities to do at home. We have already seen so much progress with Ella Marie. This joint effort through therapy sessions and home intervention from us has provided Ella Marie with an environment that is purposefully working on vocalizing and listening. Below you will see what we worked on this week:
  • We began this session with informally assessing how well Ella Marie is turning to sound when sounds from various noisemakers are presented. Ella Marie has started consistently turning to sound, but was also consistently turning to the left side. Therefore she was turning to sound, but it was not always in the correct direction. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Ella Marie was not turning to sound consistently before this point so this is definitely a work in progress.
  • Our new goal for this week is to vocalize to make an action continue. An example of this is getting her to vocalize for a toy or play to continue. In therapy, we had a toy that would spin around. We want Ella Marie to coo or verbalize for me to make it spin again. Another way to understand this is that for an older child we would not want them to just point to the snack that they want, we would want them to ask for it. It is very important that she learns that her voice can make something happen. Any toy that has an action can be used for this type of activity. This is not a goal that will necessarily be checked off this week. We will continue to work on this goal. Also, we have to recognize that when a toy is new sometimes a child or in this case Ella Marie will be very quiet because they are trying to figure it out. This is one reason why this goal make take a little bit to accomplish. Also, if Ella Marie is not cooing at first to start the toy/game, we can look for any change in behavior such as giving eye contact. We can build on this to encourage talking.
  • Kelli reiterated how important it is to say what we are doing before we do it. Example: We are going to make this toy go round and round.
  • We are continuing to work on our previous goal of pitch and imitating Ella Marie's her vocalizations.
  • We are continuing to work on babbling with consonants ex. ba ba ba or ma ma moo
  • We discussed paying attention to the sounds that Ella Marie responds to. Ex. Does she respond to wooden blocks hit together, the cymbals, the dog barking?
  • We are also starting to try to get her to recognize voice especially her name. It was suggested that we can add a sound with her name such as clapping. At first she may respond to the sound, but later we can take away the sound.
  • Finally we are supposed to continue with the finger plays and trying to get Ella Marie to engage in Patty Cake.

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