oral dispraxia

[tiffany84]

my 4 year old son has just been diagnosed with specific language imparement ( oral dispraxia ). ive since read up on it and i thin he may also have dispraxia. im not going bk to hospital until end of may so was wandering if anyone could help me. what can i do to help his speech? will he ever be like his friends? how do i stop him being so emotional? please help me :(

Oh, Tiffany.

I don't have personal experience of oral dyspraxia, but hopefully someone will. I do know of a friend's DS who had this DX and he's doing well at school now he's in juniors, but it took quite a long time to get his speech going. He never seemed to have many problems finding friends, though.

Hi
My son is 4 and has verbal/oral dyspraxia. It is a shock when you have a diagnosis- but you can move forward. Who carried out the diagnosis? They should be now offering support and some sort of plan. My ds has come on in the year since his dx- it is a long and slow road and he needs frequent and relevant speech therapy. Please contact me if you need more of a chat

There is a Facebook group too. Where ate you?

They should have said where are you - dam. Auto correct

Hi Tiffany,

Have you tried cued articulation or talk tools?

ds1 has suspected verbal dyspraxia as well as autism, and these 2 methods have been really successful so far.

There is a video by the woman who invented cued articulation here on youtube :. If you can't access SALt right away you can always take a look and learn a few of the signs. We used it to get ds to learn how to make sounds in isolation and then later when he was using words, but inserting the wrong sounds or missing sounds, the visual cue acts as a prompt to do the right sound. I know it doesn't work for everybody but ds is very visual so it has helped enormously. because of his autism it is hard to get him to look at your face when you make the sounds, but bizarrely when you video it he will watch it quite happily, and we think this is how he learn the lip positions etc.

Lots of people also swear by talk tools which is an oral placement therapy (sticking objects in mouth to build strength in lips, jaws etc. Sounds very odd and SALTS often say there is no evidence to link it to speech acquisition. It is like a work out for the mouth and I didn't see any harm in trying it, and we saw good results. This is the UK company for getting the equipment and training but you can also DIY for example using an electric toothbrush instead of the expensive z-vibes tool. I think they run free parent seminars sometimes www.eg-training.co.uk/.

Others may have more suggestions but this is what I feel has worked for us.

Best wishes