Do you know any exercises for mouth/tongue for a 4 year old?

[bluebear]

Ds is 4 and a bit, has had hearing problems for years which is why we thought his speech was below average...but he was assessed this morning and the new idea is that his mouth and lips aren't working well enough.
He is being referred for speech and language therapy but won't be seen for at least 4 months so I was wondering if anyone has been here before and can describe any mouth exercises we could start him on while we wait.
TIA.

Wow - great Xmas present! One of the main reasons I'm sticking to my guns about ds being deaf (and therefore routine-obsessed, and ahem..challenging) and not AS is that he pointed (to his beaker because he was thirsty) very early...you have taught me that much!
Will def. drop into SN if/when we get some more clinical stuff done. Lurk there a bit anyway...not so surprisingly.

Saker - I've looked at those whistles - boy! are my neighbours going to love us!

He sees a number of 'health professionals' with a number of different 'hats' on (his general pead is also his allergy specialist), but so far we've been chucked from pillar to post - ended up with 2 audiology cons. at different centres, and no 'developmental' assessment except the speech and lang. which he was discharged from originally.
My boss's wife is a ed. psych. and has given me some info on who to contact for an assessment, but I have been hanging on to the hope that his hearing will get sorted out and he will magically change. Hadn't really thought about the lack of imitation until you mentioned it TBH.
Hmmm...... think I better go have a chat with dh.

I hope I haven't opened a can of worms. I think if he is properly assessed by someone who knows what they are doing and they say fine then you can concentrate on the deafness. But all too often you get passed from pillar to post (each one with its own waiting list). I think (but am not 100% sure) that dyspraxia can come with imitation problems as well, so don't automatically think anything worse iyswim. We were passed from person to person so I know what it's like. It was a major relief to finally see someone who knew what they were doing.
How is his waving bye bye etc? With ds1 we had to teach him hand over hand, but ds2 and ds3 just did it from copying. DS1 refused to wave bye bye for about 3 years, has now just started again, but it looks like a Nazi salute. How did he learn self help stuff? Eveyrthing we taught ds1 had to be hand over hand- even drinking out of a beaker.

have a look at apraxia kids though- lots of links to personal stories- which would be useful for you to compare- if they are saying that his mouth and lips aren't working well I would imagine that that is what they are considering. (apraxia is the US term for verbal dyspraxia btw). With help its very treatable. I went to a Nancy Kaufman conference on it, very interesting and she showed the difference that therapy made (a boy who went from incomprehensible to normal speech).

Waving bye bye came very late - about age 3 I think. He does a very good 'stinky' waving hand under nose, but that has been since he was about 3 and a half.
Am trying to remember other stuff - He had milk from a lidded beaker since he was 9 months and tbh he still does when about the house. He has got plastic tumblers, which we all chant ' 2 hands for a cup' when they are picked up, but he forgets and lets them fall over or will walk with them at an angle and spill drink everywhere (kind of thought that this was normal for this age). The nursery taught him to use a spoon - muggins was still spooning dollops into his mouth until I popped back to nursery one day to see him eating his breakfast porridge with a spoon. Has recently mastered knife and fork (but I def. did a few sessions of hand on hand for that).
I'm working the next couple of days but dh is at home with ds so he is going to try some 'simon says' action games tomorrow and see what he thinks..dh def. can see a big difference in copying between ds and 2 yr old dd.
Thanks Baka - it's def. worth investigating.

Am flicking between apraxia kids and here! Do you think there might be a link between the possible apraxia and that fact that he has to say 'Mum' at least 7 times before he can get the next word out. (He does it like it's one of his routines though - if you interupt him after mum number 6, he pauses then says mum number 7 then continues the sentence)
(A lovely bloke on a bus once listened to him, then made a point of having a conversation with me - about the weather or something - the bloke had a pronounced stammer, and I felt that he was trying to be 'supportive' of my 'stammering' son )
I had 2 years of speech therapy age 3-5, was incomprehensible beforehand according to my mother, will have to see if she can remember anything more!

I think the spilling cup thing is normal for his age- I wouldn't worry about that. It sounds as if his ability to learn self help skills by copying is actually pretty good. It may be that he can't copy accurately (motor problems? dyspraxia?), rather than he doesn't understand imitation iyswim.

To give you a comparison ds1 was trying to hang tree decorations up when they had just dropped off, but he was just holding them next to the tree, not even trying to put them on. It's like he can;'t actually even see what someone else does (and probably can't- according to latest neurological research), he can't understand how someone else'\s movements relate to him.

Ds2's ability to copy actions accurately isn't fantastic, but he understands what he is meant to be doing and tries to copy. He's a bit cack handed but nothing else.

Gosh would have no idea about the routines, but dyspraxic type things often overlap with other conditions and certainly being rigid goes with dyspraxia (or can do).

Ds2 had a few of those whistles in his Christmas stocking . He wouldn't blow at all to start with but since he started making a noise on the recorder in Music therapy he hasn't looked back and loves taking it in turns with me to blow. Needless to say ds1 has to demonstrate his oral skills also.

Ds2 doesn't seem to have verbal dyspraxia, but probably oral dyspraxia. Verbal dyspraxia is to do with the messages from the brain getting mixed up and making it hard to work the mouth and tongue correctly and I think is the hardest to treat. Oral dyspraxia is more to do with the actual muscles themselves. There seem to be a variety of specific speech sound disorders also but no-one has really analysed Ds2's speech sounds in that much detail.

Ds2 doesn't imitate well at all but this may well be due to poor motor planning as he doesn't spontaneously do any physical actions well either and he has a lot of gross and fine motor problems.

Your description of your Ds with an open cup sounds familiar and Ds2 still has a lidded cup most of the time.

Bluebear, I think sometimes that if a child is hard to understand they get into habits of insisting you repeat back or they are allowed to say things in a certain way to ensure they are understood. Ds2 often says a word over and over until we repeat it correctly. Recently he has actually started correcting us but that took a long time to come and doesn't always make things better. for example this morning he was saying " I'm bad", we said "Bad?" "No not bad, bad". Turned out he meant bored.

Most of ds's routine stuff is just his way of 'knowing what's coming' I'm pretty sure, his way of feeling more at home when he's missing the input from speech...well, that's my interpretation. I'll see how he does with copying dh's actions tomorrow (ds also couldn't put decorations on the tree but I didn't see him even try, although dd did, ds just gave them to dh to do)
Have just read that apraxic kids tend to have good receptive but poor expressive language - that was def. the finding in ds's original S and L assessment - receptive was more than a year ahead, but expressive was behind (although dif. to measure as he wouldn't talk to the therapist so she had to go from my list of his 'words'.)

Ho, hum, I have ironing to do rather than surfing..

what you say about receptive language is right and in Ds2's case his receptive language is worse than his expressive which goes hand in hand with ASD and related disorders. Ds2 is query autistic but I also agree with you that I think some of his more controlling behaviour is to do with not being understood. If your Ds's receptive language is good I would be less concerned about Asperger's etc.

Saker, my dd does the 'repeating word until mum/dad guesses it right and says it' thing

Ds only repeats the first word of the sentence...invariably 'mum', then will gabble his little head off...if challenged over a 'new' word he is most likely to insist that his pronunciation is correct!

Weird, this..it was an audiology assessment this morning so I spent last night typing up notes for dh to take on his behaviour which in my opinion shows his long term hearing problems, only to end up with a 'lets wait 2 months and see' from audiology, but a revived 'oh but what about the drooling and speech problems.'

All I need now is for him to have one of his mysterious allergy reactions tonight and we'll have hit the jackpot

It's hard isn't it - you do seem to spend time going in circles and waiting for an appointment that's going to sort it all out only to get passed on to the next one. It might be worth talking it all through with the paed and asking for a proper assessment just to get a clear idea of where things are.

Thanks for talking to me Baka Saker and all. I'm going to try out a lot of the suggestions over the next few days/weeks and will try to find the way to a more overall assessment for ds.

Must do the ironing now