Speech

[cleowasmycat]

My almost 6 year old dsd has had speech therapy for a year. She has issues with c, f, v and s so consequently everything she says begins with a b and is quite difficult to understand. She can say these letters but seems to not want to and gets very cross with any encouragement. The therapy she has is only with school so should she be having more?

May she have Glue Ear?

Glue ear might have caused the problem but she should be growing out of it now if she did have it. Do you know what SALT she is getting at school? How much? Is it provided by a therapist or is it a TA doing exercises? I would ask if you could sit in with the therapist one day to see what she is doing and ask her for some exercises your dd could do at home. My ds has much more significant speech problems but I have found it takes up to six months for something to transfer to natural speech once he is managing it in therapy.

Agree with sitting in with the therapist - like music lessons or learning to drive or any lesson in anything, a 'once a week lesson' isn't going to make a significant difference unless you help her 'practise' inbetween.

Also, checking that it is a SaLT or SaLT asst that is seeing her at school, not just the school trying to be helpful but without qualified direction.

Am presuming her hearing has been checked recently?

Definitely not her ears although she does speak very loudly! If you insist on her pronouncing an s she will say it but doesn't seem to want to do it. Worried it's going to hold her back. She has a weekly session with a senco at school.

Has she seen SALT? We're the school sessions set up by SALT? If not, I think you she ask for a referral to them and get a professional programme of therapy (which the school may administer).

Tbh if it is 'just' saying her c,v,s and f wrong then she is unlikely to get a lot of SALT input but it should be fixable fairly quickly. Does she just say them wrong at the beginning of words or in the middle/end and in blends?

Should ask

Mostly at the beginning. Wink instead of drink, dimming instead of swimming, bone instead of phone.

As her sm I only have so much input. Her dm deals with it and the school.

My DS couldn't say f or s. It took a year of speech therapy to sort it out. Our GP referred him to SALT where they did a triage appointment, worked out the issue then he had 4 appointments with a speech therapist at 2 weekly intervals then a 6 -8 week gap then another block. He had 4 blocks all up.

He had to be taught to say the individual letter, then blending it with the next letter, then when s was in the middle of a word like whistle, then plurals.

It took a while for him to get it but then the progress was quick. But we did supplement after 9 months with the SALT with a private speech therapist for a block and he really took to her way of working so she was able make progress very quickly.
For the whole year we did have 10minutes a day of practise exercises to do. They were given by both speech therapists as only doing it once a fortnight wasn't enough.
It is a frustrating process for both but now you wouldn't know he had had a problem but this time last year I was tearing my hair out trying to blend "St"

Zzzzzz she is not getting weekly SALT input, just some time once a week with a teacher or TA. While this is commendable I do think there needs to be proper SALT input even if only to give a programme for the teacher to deliver.

On DS had similar but also severe language and phonic delay. My experience was that I had to keep on constantly to get SALT help to the right level.

Both the school and nursery helped as well and in yr 1 he got weekly therapy plus senco help.

It has made a huge difference and he is now reaching targets. It has though impacted his reading level but we're working on that.

So I guess what I'm saying is that if the problem is bad then it needs intensive help and you need to fight to get that. Yes the child may resist (my DS did) but it's important to keep on.

Can you arrange private help as well perhaps?

My not On

Unfortunately her dm won't look at me let alone speak to me.