Language in Leaps and Bounds

Originally uploaded by sammi's mom

Samantha has been working soooooo hard on her language skills lately, and if nothing else has supported her acceptance into ESY, this sure does! She is at such a crucial breakthrough point right now, and although we work with her all the time at home, having structured speech therapy and school sessions will really boost her emerging skills. Since she’s been speaking, she’s always pretty much ignored the first letter of each word, or added her own to it, whether it was correct or not (for example, instead of “book”, she’ll say “gook”, “grandma” is “mama”, “grandpa” is “papa”, etc.). But recently, with the assistance of visual/physical prompts, she’s finally getting it! We started to see progress when she would say a word with a closed-lip sound (starting with an “m”, “p” or “b”), accompanied by tapping her lips with her forefinger. We realized that this was something her speech therapist was teaching her (it’s hard, now that she’s older and no longer having therapy in the home, for us to know everything they’re working on—we rarely, if ever, get reports home, unfortunately, and we were always used to having one of us attend her sessions), and she’s adapted it to be a prompt for all words that we’re trying to correct her on. Now, whenever we stress the sound of the first letter in a word to her (regardless of the sound that it makes), she puts her finger to her lips and tries to say it! Yesterday she had us cheering her on as she said, with finger to lips, “Ssssammi!!!” Yay!!!! And yesterday she said “Gamma” and “Gampa.” I’m so proud! I won’t go through all of the words she’s been correcting from her previous versions, as there are too many, but I think school has been stressing it more since we asked them to add it to her IEP. I think I had mentioned this in a previous post, but the school had put that they wanted her to accomplish 2-3 word sentences as one of her goals. That’s all well and good, but not if nobody can understand what she’s saying! So we had them add that they would work with her to say intelligible words. And hence, the explosion. She’s so proud of herself, too, and rightfully so. Now if we could just get past the potty training…

The photos at the top are some pics I took at the playground on Sunday. What a wonderful way to spend Mother’s Day!