Speech, Ella's way...

Ella continues to make good leaps and bounds lately, as we've seen ever since Ella got her glasses. She's speaking more and her motor skills are making good progress.

On the gross motor front, Ella's learned to make small forward jumps in order to hop her way across the floor. Previously she'd only been jumping straight up-and-down. This is good because it takes a lot more confidence and balance skill to jump forward than it does to jump in place. Her climbing is getting a lot better, but she's still behind in this area, but that will come in time with better balance.

Speech-wise, Ella is now up to using a total of 8-12 spoken words and word approximations, which vocabulary wise is more on par with a 16-month old than a 3.75 year old. Her diction is also pretty crude, again like the younger child.

However, one interesting twist is that Ella is already putting these together to make sentences, and also combining them with ASL signs. This is very amusing, because usually children with such a limited vocabulary only use single words. Hearing Ella very roughly say "Hep Meh" (help me) is an interesting contrast. Her speech ability is really basic, but it contrasts with her more comparatively advanced conceptual language abilities.

Of course, we're used to out-of-order development but it continues to amuse me.

Additional speech therapist...

Last week we started taking Ella to see a private speech therapist, as a supplement to the school-based therapy she gets right now. So far she's had two visits, but these have mostly focused on evaluating Ella's existing speech in detail (using parts of a Kaufman Speech Praxis test).

This isn't to say the school system isn't doing a good job, but the school environment and private therapy settings offer different advantages. The school environment offers a lot of other kids her age to model from, as well as a mixture of both group and one-on-one speech therapy. However, neither of us are present at school, and we do not have frequent interactions with her therapists. This means that our at-home efforts are a little unguided and only sync-up with the school once a month or so.

The private therapy, on the other hand, is all one-on-one and there's no peers to learn from. However, one of us attends each session, and her therapist intends to start giving us plans for at-home therapy tactics.

Adding another therapist now also seems very appropriate. Since she got her glasses she's made a lot of progress in the "raw fundamentals" of speech. This seems to us (and her school therapists agree) to be a very good time to increase the intensity of her therapy and catch her up a bit now that she's starting to pick things up faster.

As for her speech progress, we've recently seen several new bits of speech progress emerge:

-she combines "hi" with a name to form a two-word greeting. (Hi Dada)

-she uses a lot more different letter combinations than before in her babbling.

-she's started jargoning where she's stringing together a stream of different syllables, rather than just repeating the same one or two. ("nabooka dooga aeee!" instead of "booka booka booka")

Of course, there's lots of things she's still having trouble with, such as sounds that involve bringing the tip of your tongue up (t, l, etc.), sounds using the teeth (f, v, th, s) and most sound combinations that involve going from an open jaw to a mostly closed one. But that's what we're all working on.