My DS is 10 and has AS, dyspraxia and speech and language difficulties. His speech sounds normal to the casual observer, and he converses OK with adults, but it is mostly exchanges of information, he simply cannot keep up with chat especially amongst his peers.
I was out earlier with him and two of his friends, he has known them all his life and they are in his class at school. They were chatting away about some random subject while DS lagged behind. I brought DS into the. conversation, he was just getting started when they moved on and changed the subject. Not because of him, it was just normal chat, then one of them saw a dog and they started talking about dogs while DS was still on the previous subject. He just can't process the conversation and join in at the same time. He often deals with it by yelling one of the other children's name till they turn to him then doing something like pretend to walk into a wall and say "is this mad?" and they humour him but then go back to their own conversation. Sooner or later they are going to start getting really annoyed by this behaviour.
He is currently having an independent SALT assessment to support a statement appeal, so I can ask the SALT for advice, but in addition I wondered if anyone had any suggestions for things we could do at home to help him with this? We've tried role play, with limited success, none of us are very good at it.