Hi there,
Just a real quick update on our private language therapy. I found a wonderful SLP in our area to work with my dd. She is doing really well. Some of you know my concerns about auditory processing. She has been working with my dd for 2 weeks now, plus we’ve been doing the assigned homework in between days. The biggest issues are auditory memory and a real deficit of vocabulary. It may be a retrieval issue more than a non-existant vocabulary. I wont get into details right now, but I said I would come back and update you once we got started. My favorite part of it is that she is in a room with a camera and I am able to watch and listen on a monitor down the hall. She even told my dd that it was a commercial so that she could send mom a message and she talked to me briefly, showed me what they did and why they did it. She also showed me some things to do with her throughout the day, like to ask her if she has a picture of something in her head. One of the exercises is to hear a word and draw a quick picture in 5 seconds, so last night all she wanted to do was sit and color with me, so we got out paper, pencils and crayons. Then we would take turns saying a word, like “clock” or “puppy” and draw it real quick and color it. It is amazing how much she can remember when she has a picture.
The toughest one is memory. We say a sentence like “will you please stand up and smile before jumping up and down”. She cannot remember and repeat all that, but she is trying and is able to repeat longer and longer sentences and she is learning that when she repeats it she can recall it for a longer period of time. She also has to say if it was a direction or not. Talk about juggling.
Anyway, it’s interesting. I’m looking forward to the rest of our summer.
Kathryn