Sue Ward's List: Speech Therapy Tasks

• Play with your kid, then engage in a two way conversation, giving your kid plenty of time to respond in [remember that eye contact is important too]. Encourage the kid's attempts at speech, so that he is reinforced to keep trying. Playing with your kid is extremely important for speech acquisition and for developing appropriate obedience and respect from your child.
  
• some Down Syndrome kids become withdrawn at school because teachers and others put an emphasis on kids learning more and more words e.g. in English, reading, mathematics - being school word focused so to say - whereas the kid actually needs to work with speech with the social words he is comfortable in using and is comfortable to being spoken to in.
• Kids with Down Syndrome tend to follow the non-Down's Syndrome pattern of speech development, except it occurs at a much slower pace and speech can remain very difficult to understand, particularly by those unaccustomed to the poor sound development.
• Updating the speech / language concern noted above, I found out when I took Jacob to see a neurologist in Dec., 2003, (Jacob aged 3years, 11months) that Jacob has auditory short term memory difficulties; he forgets how to say the word before he has mastered it. It is a form of dispraxia. We now need to work around this for his speech to develop - it wasn't that the genetic opportunity with language was lost, though that is still a possibility, but appears to be more a short term memory problem with remembering how to express new words. Our entire strategy for his speech development would have been very, very different. The importance of speech repetition would have been emphasised a lot, lot, lot more. Take note with your own kids - there are many who have kids with Down Syndrome who don't have the short term auditory memory problem, so they can say this or that speech strategy worked for them and that you should use their speech strategy, but it wont necessarily work for your kid with Down Syndrome.
  
• Down Syndrome and speech therapy will both go hand in hand for some time yet to come.

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•  Speech skills with emphasis on articulation and intelligibility would be targeted in therapy during this period (Swift and Rosin, 1990). An individual analysis of oral motor strengths and challenges is important to determine what specific skills need to be addressed, for example, does the child have low muscle tone or muscle weakness in the oral facial area? difficulty with motor coordination? difficulty with motor planning? Are other speech areas such as voice and fluency affecting intelligibility? Each of these areas can be worked on if they are affecting communication ability for an individual child.
• Therapy may also be approached through the needs of the curriculum. In this approach, vocabulary would be taught based on the vocabulary that the child needs for success in science or social studies. The therapy may be proactive, teaching in advance the language skills that the child will need for the official curriculum, formal and informal classroom interactions, following directions in class and learning the rules and routines, and skills for interacting with peers.
• The goal is to find treatment approaches and methods which will enable each child to reach his communication potential.

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