Making Sounds
Posted by Deb on Wednesday April 8, 2009 at 10:03 pmI forgot to write about Toby’s appointment with the Speech Therapist last week. Never mind. He had another appointment this morning, so I’ll tell you about both of them now.
The SLT who did the speech assessment last week was the third that Toby has seen. I can’t say I’m very impressed with the speech therapy services in this area – the actual SLTs have all been great, but the system seems to be barely hanging together. We asked for an appointment way back in late 2006, and he was assessed in April 2007, then again in September that year and then again in November, when he was finally put on the waiting-list for treatment (rather than just assessment). He had a very short course of speech therapy in April 2008 – only three appointments, because the SLT was about to go on maternity leave, and so he was put on the waiting-list for review in August or September. After I chased it up in September, they sent us another appointment, but it was on a day when we had dental appointments arranged elsewhere, so I phoned and left a message to say we needed to change it. A week later I got a call – the day before the day of the appointment – to cancel it
We finally got another assessment in October, but the SLT who did it only works two days a week and couldn’t fit Toby in at a time when I could attend without Louie, so we had to wait until someone could… In February, I chased them up, and we finally got another appointment, for last Wednesday.
Our appointment was for 9.15, but we didn’t get in until after 9.45 (which was strange, as we were the first appointment of the day). Once we were in, however, L, the new SLT, and Toby hit it off right away. She said, “Hello Toby!” and asked him if he knew her name. He nodded. She asked what it was, and he leaned back against the wall and looked at her as though sizing her up. And then…he farted. And immediately grinned, clearly feeling that he was clever and hilarious. And L agreed with him – she burst out laughing, and the two of them were instant friends.
I suggested she skip the bit of the assessment which tests comprehension and vocabulary, as a) we were running so late and b) I know there’s no problem there. She went straight to checking out his pronunciation of various sounds. He delighted her by making a wide range of animal sounds, and by teasing her with the wrong sound sometimes (you can tell from the grin and the sideways glance that he knows full well what he’s doing). She showed him a picture and asked what it was. He told her it was a house, and while she got her bits of paper organised, she asked what colour it was. He listed off all the colours on the house, and then insisted on telling her all the colours for every other picture in her flip-chart. He told her that he’s “three-and-a-half”, and that he is “getting giant, but Barney is already giant”, and lots more besides. It wasn’t long before she looked at me and said, “I see what you mean about the vocabulary!”
At the end of the assessment, she offered a short session of speech therapy beginning this week, at 9.15 each Wednesday morning – that works for us, because Scratchy can go into work a bit later than usual, which allows me to leave Louie at home and focus better on Toby. So his first treatment was today.
We were crossing the car-park to the door of the building when L arrived and got out of her car. She spotted Toby and called “Hello!” and he called “Hello!” back. And then he showed her how to get into the building, and which doors to go through, and which corridors to walk down, to get to the Speech Therapy department
Toby had his “workbook” with him – the first Superphonics book, which he “reads” when his brothers are doing “their work”. And so the appointment started with him telling her all the sounds he knew from that – which is most of them. Then she showed him some pictures from the Jolly Phonics range – which has to be the most illogical and unintuitive phonics programme I’ve ever seen. The sound “m”, for example, is represented by a drawing of a plate with a knife and fork. From this, the child is meant to think “food” and thus “delicious” and thus “mmmm” – never mind that most children his age will say “yum” rather than “mmmm”. (I was looking at it and thinking, “uh…meal?”) The airplane picture represents “n”. A pair of castanets is “c”. A drawing of a cat might not be very exciting, but at least most toddlers would recognise what it was. L agreed with me that many of the pictures are bizarre choices, but it’s what the local schools use and thus it’s what the local SALTs use.
Fortunately this won’t make up a lot of what L plans to do with him. He can make almost all the sounds – in fact he can make all the sounds that are on their chart for children aged 4 to 4.5 years. He can also put almost all the beginning consonants together with following vowel-sounds – things like “ma, me, moo, my, mo”. The only ones that cause him any difficulty are “g” (which he often turns into “d”) and “c” (which becomes “t”) – and these are the two sounds that I, without consciously thinking about it, have been using in games with him recently – hence the names of our ducks in the bath, for example.
We talked about quiet sounds and loud sounds, and about letting him feel the difference between the two by touching his throat as he makes them. L said “he’s a bit young for that, but then he’s very advanced in everything else so maybe he would get it okay”. And indeed, he got it just fine when we tried it out this afternoon.
She asked him to make his animal sounds again, just because she enjoyed them so much last week, and she laughed at the things he said and did and told me (repeatedly), “He’s brilliant!” He has certainly charmed her – and the feeling seems to be mutual, for he’s already making plans about what he’s going to tell L when we go back next week. I only hope she’s ready for him
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Jack took off down the street to his mate’s house, and George, Freddy and Toby helped me plant more vegetable seeds and re-pot the seedlings that had come up in trays. The seedlings were inadvertently left outside last night (by which I mean: it was all Scratchy’s fault!
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