Dallas Reading and Language Services
Considering Therapy? Read Signs that your child may benefit from Speech Language Therapy
Reading, Language and Speech Therapy Services
Dallas Reading and Language Services specializes in serving school age and pre-school children. The main therapist utilizes a multi-modal approach which actively engages the client's strengths while addressing weaker areas.
About our Speech-Language Therapy
For Toddlers and Pre-Schoolers
We can help your child with speech problems such as articulation, phonological disorders, apraxia, or dysarthria. Pre-school age children respond well to improving their speech skills when sounds become easier to perceive and more concrete. We use a speech cue program in addition to direct kinesthetic, auditory or visual feedback. This program has a hand cue for each sound, along with picture cards that represent each sound with it's letter match. These cards can also be used as a beginning program to address reading skills in children that are not ready for other traditional multi-sensory reading programs.
We assist young children that have language delays by providing language stimulation in a structured environment. Language therapy with young children is designed to expose the child to language forms and concepts, and provide a meaningful format for the child to practice and succeed on their level. We help the child build categories, and increase their understanding of how concepts are put together and related to one another.
Therapy for pre-school age children is done within a context of literacy through using speech cues with letters, using story cards and other stories, sequencing common activities, using story boxes, and using words in addition to targeted pictures and objects. For our younger clients, we use a highly individualized approach which targets each child's communication weaknesses while capitalizing on the child's strengths. Our therapy with pre-school children is structured to be literacy rich. Our main speech-language pathologist believes this is important. Children that have language difficulties in pre-school are at higher risk for learning problems, and these should be monitored and addressed early.
Family members are allowed to observe therapy in the room as long as their presence does not affect the child's participation. Parents receive regular updates on their child's therapy, either through written notes or verbally.
Toddlers and pre-school age children that attend the Dallas Day School can receive speech-therapy and other needed therapies as a part of their school day. All of the Dallas Day School classes are visited by a speech-language pathologist at least once a week. Dallas Reading and Language Services provides language classes for the toddlers and a literacy program for the pre-schoolers.
For School Age Children
We address the overall communication and language skills of older children in a holistic manner. School age children in a one-one therapy setting often make huge gains in speech-therapy. Many of these children respond well to a multi-sensory program for improving speech. This has been particularly true for children that have apraxia. We use whatever modality the child naturally learns best with to improve speech skills.
Understanding and using language is so important to many facets of a child's life. If a child is missing pieces when listening to directions or a story, they are trying to fit together what they do have to make sense of what is happening around them. We help to change how a child processes language to make it more efficient and allow the child to grasp the whole picture. Much of language therapy is also aimed at improving a child's understanding of how concepts are related, how parts relate to a whole, how words are put together to expand sentences, and how to unlock the process of learning by inferencing.
At Dallas Reading and Language Services reading programs are offered to children who are behind their age or grade level only. We use three main programs to address reading decoding and comprehension skills, all of which aim at building underlying areas of weakness and changing the way a child approaches the task of reading. This is different from traditional reading tutoring at a tutor center where the skill areas are taught with additional exposure to the material and instruction. Many of the reading programs that we use are also used by trained tutors for children that have been diagnosed with dyslexia. Children using these programs not only increase sound awareness, but also their awareness of what sounds feel and look like. Clients are better able to discriminate and sequence sounds, and read and spell words. A major advantage to these programs is that clients learn to self correct their errors through kinesthetic or sensory feedback. Similar strategies that are used to improve language comprehension skills are applied to increasing reading comprehension.
We know that there are many methods for reading instruction. Despite inconsistency in how reading has been taught in recent years, many children did learn the basic skills necessary to be good readers. With children that have typical intelligence and multiple learning opportunities, the problem with reading often has to do with specific weaknesses.
Many children that have reading difficulties have decreased phonological awareness skills. This is the ability to hear and manipulate sounds. As children are learning to read, most classrooms will have some phonological awareness activities to enhance their learning. These could be finding items that begin with a certain sound, rhyming games, clapping syllables in words, and deleting sounds from words.
Children with poor sound awareness often also show difficulty with language processing overall, from paragraphs to sentences, words to individual sounds. Speech-Language therapy can assist these children with increasing their efficiency and accuracy when it comes to understanding what they hear.
Phonological awareness has been researched and studied by professionals. A major finding is that phonological awareness is a key skill that is necessary for learning to decode and read efficiently (View our Articles Link for more information). This weakness in the ability to hear sounds may be further compounded by decreased awareness of how we produce sounds. In short, these children do not hear, perceive, and sometimes produce sounds the same way as others do. The solution is to provide a different/multi-sensory method of teaching.
At Dallas Reading and Language Services, programs for speech, reading and/or language are incorporated as needed on an individual basis. The therapist targets these goals within many of the same activities, thus the child will work towards more than one individualized goal within an activity.
About our Speech/Language Therapy
If therapy is recommended for your child after the evaluation, an individualized plan with goals will be discussed with parents prior to beginning. Most of our clients attend therapy twice weekly, although some may attend three times and others who are closer to meeting goals may only attend once weekly. Different reading programs may be implemented along with the child's specific goals to address his or her areas of need. At Dallas Reading and Language Services, we usually recommend the reading programs for children who are in grades Kindergarten through middle school and showing need for this type of intervention. Parents are welcome to observe sessions as they are able. Your child may have materials for home practice with verbal and written instructions for caregivers. The child's family and pediatrician will receive monthly progress reports, and each client will be formally re-evaluated at least every six months or at discharge.
Rachel Betzen CCC/SLP has completed the LindaMood Bell LiPS program and used LiPS® with many children. Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes, Inc.® does not endorse third party workshops or clinics. Visit their main site at www.lindamood-bell.com to learn more about LiPS®.
Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.
- Bradley Millar