Auditory Processing

What I found most critical about speech impaired children is the auditory processing retention. They are unable to reproduce what they they heard and have difficulty in processing. As a result, they appear `deaf', inattentive and sometimes labeled as stupid.

How can you help to stimulate this?
I found through my journey the following helped my son:

1. Sequence story telling
2. Reciting a story from picture story books
3. Reading

A child may be able to read but still faced difficulty in comprehension. He is unable to understand a sequence of story and this is commonly reflected also in speech reproduction. It inter-links.

It's vital to stimulate this processing of the brain in order for the child to progress academically. What good it is if he can read but unable to understand the content of the text. It would be almost like having the same difficulty in understanding what is being said/instructed to him. Maybe that's why some of these children develop bad tantrums as they fail to deliver their wants/needs to us appropriately. And very often our instructions to them are in vain.

Telling a story

Telling a story in the right order or explaining what happened can cause problems.
students are often unaware of the need to sketch out a rough outline of an essay before actually writing it. This can look like this:
1. Introduction - how we decided to go on a trip.
2. What we took with us.
3. Journey to the mountains.
4. Setting up camp by a lake.
5. Getting lost on the first day.
6. Two million mosquitoes at night!
7. Cooking a meal on the camp fire.
8. Singing songs on our journey home.
9. Conclusion - like to go again, but with a mosquito net!
(ref: http://www.dyslexia-parent.com/mag40.html)

With this plan on a sheet of paper, a child can then write a paragraph about each part of the story, confident in the knowledge that each section of the story will be in the right order.

Social Language Development Part II

Following to my previous post on social language development - the pictures with the bubble conversation, I have a few more tips to input.
Your child might find it difficult to express himself. Bear in mind he/she might not have the `perspective' or the ability to put himself/herself in the other person's shoes.
Suggestion: Do a role play. Involving 2 characters: Mum and son.
Mum will wear a pair of spectacles and says - You must brush your teeth
Boy - wears a cap and listens.
Reverse the role - you wear the cap and he wear the glasses. This is to assist your child to understand better.

Social Language Development Part I

These are two sample pictures which you could use for social language development.

Picture 1 (boys playing football):

1. To enable to child to form thoughts out of scenes he sees in a picture appropriately. Make him think of suitable conversational lines/application

2. For those children who require more prompts/assistance, you could start by asking some of the following questions which will help the child to associate his thoughts/imagination to form the correct respond e.g What are the children doing? Where are they playing?.....

3. You might want to ask the child - what are the children going to do after playing football?

Respond such as - Boy won't be saying ....That's spiderman. He might actually say spiderman but in the wrong context - instead referring to what he sees on the T-shirt.

Picture 2 (frightened girl)

1. Child is to indicate his understand of emotions. The ability to provide several reasons to forming the emotion.

2. You might want to assist the child with the reasons by giving the child the idea where is the place? - playground? Maybe she climbed up a tall tunnel? Or perhaps she saw something scary? Whatever deemed suited to mean something logical to the picture.

Aim: To initiate conversation building. Get the child to say correctly in full sentences. Allow the child to imagine and think on his own.

For more pictures, please contact me. Images are copyright flowsnow 2008.