Program Overview
What does speech therapy do?
For your child, speech therapy may take place in a classroom or small group, or one-on-one, depending on the speech disorder. Speech therapy exercises and activities vary depending on your child’s disorder, age, and needs.
Interact through talking and playing, using books, pictures and other objects as part of language intervention to help stimulate language development.
Model correct sounds and syllables for a child during age-appropriate play to teach the child how to make certain sounds.
Provide strategies and homework for the child and parent or caregiver on how to do speech therapy at home.
Which conditions are treated with speech therapy?
Language disorders: A childhood language disorder can affect the child’s ability to learn to speak, to name objects and build complete sentences. Although the causes of these disorders are often not clear, the main known risk factors include hearing problems, general developmental problems and disorders affecting the development of the brain.
Speech disorders: Children with speech disorders have difficulty producing the sounds of speech, saying words clearly or talking fluently. Children often have trouble with pronunciation, and may have a lisp or substitute certain sounds for others. Speech disorders may be the result of developmental disorders. Another group of speech disorders, known as fluency disorders, involve problems with the flow or evenness of speech.
What are the advantages of speech therapy?
Speech therapy offers a number of benefits, including:
Empowering children to express their daily needs and thoughts independently.
Improved ability to comprehend and express ideas, thoughts, and feelings.
Preparing young children with foundational communication skills required for classroom learning.
Building vocabulary, word combinations, and sentence structure at an early age.
Reducing communication frustration and fostering joyful social interactions.
How long do you need speech therapy?
Everyone’s needs are unique. Some speech disorders improve with age — others require years of speech therapy. If a health condition caused your speech disorder, your speech and language skills may improve as you recover from the underlying issue.
How long you need speech therapy depends on your age, the type of speech disorder, how severely the disorder affects communication, and underlying health factors.
When does your child need speech therapy?
Making little or inconsistent eye contact, or appearing not to look at or listen to people talking.
Difficulty in understanding or following simple and multi-step verbal commands.
Unusual tone of voice (sing-song or flat and robot-like), stammering, prolonging words, or silent pauses.
Problems forming particular speech sounds properly or persisting with incorrect speech patterns past age expectations.
Difficulties with reading, writing, attention span, memory retention, or unclear word/sentence formation.