#slpmomof5

Drinking with a straw and holding the cup like a pro.

GOAL MET 💪👏🙌

Months of oral motor stimulation and exercises.

Birthday boy turning 2 in two weeks 🎉🎈🎉🎈🎉

Good Morning!!!

Who doesn't need a title motivation?! I know I do, and if we need it imagine our students!

My 6 years old with ASD/ADHD/ODD/APD/SPD/anxiety... needs to be motivated. He needs to know that after working hard he will have a break. I designed for him this box (or as his teacher calls it his tool box).

Besides being given with other choices at school like a break on the computer with star falls or abc ya, free choice, or drawing in the white board. After a while he got tired of the same things, and it stopped working for him. His behaviors were increasing again and his teacher ran out of options.

One day my son tells me: "mommy, I'm taking Sam to school (Sam is his wighted stuff tiger). My teacher said is ok to bring Sam, is a presentation of your favorite toy."

I told him: "Oh!, are you sure? I didn't receive a note nor an email about this. Well maybe I missed it, ok take it."

Well this wasn't true, my son just wanted to look forward to something he could feel comforted, something to work for. At the end of the day his tracher calls me and tells me it wasn't true, but if it helped him that we could work something out.

I didn't want to send Sam (his tiger) to school as it could get lost. That's when I decided to create a box with things he loves, never gets tired of them and I knew he would definitely work for this things. That's when I created this tool box.

Even though he is place in a 'Special Day Class' sometimes they don't have sensory material for our students. I decided to put things in his box that I knew are not accessible at school, like slime, putty, kinetic sand, slinky, squeezy ball, and other stuff. They are mainly sensory, but my son needs that sensory input to get centered. Well it worked, and still working for him. When I find something at the store or online that will be a great motivator for him I send it to school to be added in his tool box.

Talk with your child's teacher, find what works for your student, something similar to this "tool box" may be a great help.

Have fun creating and may your child enjoy!

SLP Mom of 5 💜✌🌱

Articulation vs. Phonological Disorders

Articulation

Articulation is the process by which sounds, syllables, and words are formed when your tongue, jaw, teeth, lips, and palate alter the air stream coming from the vocal folds. When an individual cannot produce or distort an age-expected sound/s, it draws attention away from the speaker’s message. Articulation disorders are motoric errors that can occur among people of any age; however, they are most common in children whose articulators have not developed properly.

The phonetic level is the motor act of producing the vowels and consonants (the sounds), so that we have an inventory all the sounds we need in order to speak our language(s).

Articulation vs. Phonological

The difficulty in distinguishing the difference between an Articulation disorder vs. a Phonological disorder is that they are both sound disorders, however understanding each disorder and their derivation is essential. An articulation impairment is a deficiency in an ability to produce sounds motoricaly or difficulty in having two articulators meet to produce the sound in isolation, syllable, sentence, paragraph or in conversational speech which is not consistent with chronological age. Articulation errors are considered motor-based errors. An articulation problem may be defined as difficulty in producing a single or a few sounds with no pattern or derivable rule. Articulation errors are described as a substitution, omission, addition, and distortion. Not all sound substitutions and omissions are speech errors. It's vital to take dialect and accent into consideration. Substitution is when a child replaces a sound with another sound (wamp/lamp). A distortion error is one that a child makes when he doesn’t correctly produce a sound (frontal lisp/s).

Phonological Process

A phonological process disorder is a simplification of the sound system that also affects intelligibility. Students with phonological process problems demonstrate difficulty in acquiring a phonological system; involving organizing the patterns of sounds in the brain and the output, not necessarily in the motor production of the sounds like Articulation errors. A phonological process is a patterned modification of the adult speech system. For example, a phonological process called fronting is when back sounds /k/ and /g/ that are produced by the tongue moving up in the back, are replaced with frontal sounds /t/ and /d/ which are made by the tongue coming up in the front (tat/cat, doat/goat, etc). This is typically seen in young children whose speech is unintelligible, but it can also be seen in normally developing children at the Kindergarten level. If they are only using one process to simplify their speech, we do not usually evaluate them or enroll them in therapy. Instead, we will monitor them and evaluate at a later time, if necessary. This does not mean the child is unable to produce a specific sound as with Articulation disorders. Instead, as described above, the child is stimulable for isolated sounds when prompted.

Both can put a child at risk for writing and reading disorders.

Please be aware of some of the following red flags for articulation that require immediate referral:

The phonological or phonemic level is the brainwork that organizes the speech sounds into the sound patterns to be produced. The sounds need to contrast with each other, or be distinct from one another, so that we can make sense when we talk.

Articulation (phonetic) disorder is a speech sound disorder that affects the phonetic level. The child has difficulty saying particular consonants and vowels. The reason for this may be unknown (e.g., children with functional speech disorders who do NOT have serious problems with muscle function); or the reason may be known (e.g., children with dysarthria who DO have serious problems with muscle function).

A phonological disorder is a speech sound disorder that affects the phonological (phonemic) level. The child has difficulty organizing their speech sounds into a system of sound patterns (phonemic patterns).

The difference between an Articulation and a Phonological disorder:

- An articulation disorder is the child's difficulty at a phonetic/motoric level. They have trouble making the individual speech sounds.

- A phonological disorder is a child's difficulty at their phonemic level (in their brain). This "phonemic level" is sometimes referred to as "the linguistic level" or "a cognitive level".

1) Child is very hard to understand when context is not known.

2) Child has more than one sound in error (i.e., w for r, w for l, lisp for s etc.)

that makes the child difficult to understand.

3) Child is deleting 1 or more sounds at the beginning of words (i.e., sat = at).

4) Child is deleting many sounds at the end of words decreasing intelligibility.

5) Child has a "slushy" (mouth full of marbles) sounding /s, z/ or "sh" sound.

6) Child has atypical sound substitutions or abnormal sounding speech based on your experience.

7) A child that is deleting part of s-blends (spoon = poon) and does not have /l/, /r/, or /k/ and /g/.

FYI

**Pre-K children should be 90% intelligible to unfamiliar listeners.