speech progress

I'm a bit behind here, but Ella's speech has been improving quite a bit. For about 1-2 months she's been favoring word-approximation type speech over sign, although she still uses sign for complex word.

She's still lacking ability to create r, s, sh, ch, th, f, v and several other sounds, and her use of "t" is absent in many words. However, she is willing to try to approximate most simple words.

Her speech is quite broken, and would not be readily understood by many who aren't familiar with early speech. However she still gets her point across to us. Typical examples of things she says now are "I wah mo coh key" (I want more cookies) "hu guh key key" (hug kity kitty). "uh oh pah pee" (uh oh, potty), and of course lots of "yeah" and "no" (both of which are reasonably well formed and most people should understand her).

Intonation is another area we will eventually have to work on. Her current use of pitch is a little strange, and at times humorous. For the most part, she always pronounces a given word with the same pitch pattern. "ma mi" (for mommy) is always pitched low, then exaggeratedly high. "Wheee" is always pronounced in a flat dead-pan tone (this can be quite funny when she sees a slide, and races over to it saying "Whee" in a robotic monotone..)

While this level of speech may not be much, the frequency of her talking is what's really the big difference. 6 months ago she used words only as a last resort, or when specifically asked. Now she is using spoken word on her own to make requests, answer questions, etc.

She's also starting to speak at a much louder volume. Previously everything spoken was very quiet, but she now occasionally speaks loud enough to be heard clearly in the next room over. (talking loud, but not shouting volume).

Anyway, that's my quick update, hope you all are well.

fall school...

Ok, I should have posted this last week after Ella's meeting, but oh well, I'm catching up now.

In any event, Ella will be going full-day in the fall. She'll attend an am preschool class, spend lunch with a MINC preschool class, then go into an afternoon pre-k.

In addition to all the extra school time, all of Ella's school-based therapists (PT, OT, SLP) are all increasing the amount of individual therapy time they will be giving to Ella.

This is good, as they're trying to really get her ready to go for kindergarten next year. She seems ready for the extra push, so we'll see how it goes.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but life has been a bit busy, and a lot of Ella's progress has been evolutionary, not revolutionary.

On the speech front, we've seen a lot of little things, but there is real progress there. For example her "no" is cleaned up to a point where most people can understand it, as opposed to the broken "nah ooh" (pronounced as two separate words) that she started with. She is also using a crude "yeah" (eYah!), which is good because she can now answer yes and no questions verbally (this is quite handy when driving... quickly glancing in the mirror at a light to read ASL signs is not exactly efficient.) She's also picked up a few more word approximations and is saying things like "I Wah mo ". She's also gotten a lot more willing to make a real effort at pronouncing new words.

On the motor front, her climbing ability (and confidence to try) is vastly improved. She's now handling moderately complex playground obstacles like rope suspended bridges, rope ladders, vertical ladders of a few rungs, etc. She still doesn't have quite the agility of the average child her age, but she's definitely making good progress in motor skills.

When it comes to food, she's recently gotten out of her absolute refusal to try new foods. She's now eating some soft bread products (not just crackers/cereal), and even eating burgers (with the bun).

We've also got a planning meeting coming up in about two weeks for next year's schooling. I'll definitely have more to post about after that.

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.

catching the blog up...

Ok, first a little oldish news that I haven't relayed to the blog:

At a meeting with Ella's OT, she suggested that Ella may have depth perception issues, and we might want to take her to a developmental optometrist. We took that as good advice and the results were that Ella is severely farsighted (+7.5 d), and can't focus on things close to her. As a "stepping stone" the optometrist suggested getting glasses at +6.5 see how she does with them, and visit for a follow-up (which is coming up in a week or 2 now).

Now for the rest:

Since getting the glasses, Ella has greatly improved in several areas, particularly in motor ability. The ability to focus on things close to her has given her a better ability to traverse stairs, jump, and the confidence to run around. Her general activity level is also up quite a bit. It has also increased her attention span for hands-on activities etc. We also expect this will have a positive impact on her speech, as she'll be able to see the details of how we move our mouths and tongues while speaking. She still has some motor obstacles to speech (i.e.: she cannot curl her tongue upwards yet), but the glasses at least remove one obstacle.

Of course, we recently had her mid-term IEP meeting with her teachers, where we plan her education goals, therapy levels, etc. Unfortunately, all of the review was written before her glasses arrived, and some of her goals are likely to be rather low now that she can see better. On the upside, we've got another meeting to discuss summer semester soon, and her teacher mentioned we may amend her IEP at that meeting if needed.

brief news bits..

Just a little quickie here:

Ella's been sick for the past week or so with bronchitis. However, she's finishing up a course of antibiotics, and it is clearing out now.

Ella also seems to be working on a speech approximation for "bye bye", although at this point it is little more than "buh buh". On the plus side, she's continuing with the use of ma ma, da da, and og (frog). She also frequently uses a spoken "I" mixed into her signs, and very rarely she says "Hi". All of this is really good news, as it means her spoken vocabulary is growing. In the past we've seen patterns where a new sound replaces an old one.

Ella has also taken to a lot of play activities that are good for balance and strength. Lots of jumping, bouncing, crab walking, etc. She's even starting to work on a broad jump, not just a vertical hop (I think this is her teachers in action, but I have not directly asked them).