Archives for "Speech Therapy"

It’s unbelievable, my youngest daughter is about to leave primary school. It just can’t be seven years ago that I took her to nursery, a child that had only just learned how to speak and would only talk to her family and one other child. We were still using Makaton sign language with speech when she started nursery and if my memory is correct by the time she left nursery she was still only speaking to the same child but now she also spoke to the teachers.  Is it the same child who had a speaking part in her year six play? And she has done very well in the government SATs tests including getting a level 5 in speaking and listening!

To this day I have no idea why she did not speak. It was extraordinary. She had one word which was “mummy”, by which she meant “help”. She got by with one word and her fists. She was lucky enough to get speech therapy and we went back through the animal sounds teaching her to listen – which she was very good at. Asked to point at an object she could, asked to fetch something she could. She was able follow instructions and had a good understanding of language, but she just would not/could not use it.

After weeks of trying to get her to make animal sounds we realised that she still was not making the animal sounds but that she had made up signs for each of the animals. A dog, she would stick out her tongue. A duck, she would make a beak with her hand, and for a snake she would wiggle her arm. When I told the speech therapist this she suggested that we had a go at Makaton. Again I was lucky and very quickly went on a course run at my local hospital. Makaton was fantastic, suddenly she started to talk, single words at first and then she said her first sentence when she was 3 1/2  which was “no shoes now “. That sentence has such a symbolic emotion for me, I love saying it. Whenever I take my shoes off I whisper quietly to myself “no shoes now”. My daughter will still use fists over words if she’s tired or angry and we have to work hard endlessly saying “words not fists” however luckily she does seem to save her fists for her family.

I know that the move to secondary school will be huge for her, at primary school she has been protected by children who have known her since she was three. However my experience of secondary school is extremely positive and I’m excited for her.

My elder daughter, who is very dyslexic, will also have a large change next year. For the first two years of secondary school she has been privileged to be taught in a very small English group of just 10 children. At her school this is called learning support. This small group has been taught by the same teacher for two years and it has increased my daughter’s confidence and ability enormously. I am not sure what will happen next year and whether or not we will need to find her extra support. I believe that my daughter’s improvement in all subjects  this year is partly due to the fact that the school was brave enough to let her drop French, her second language. This meant that she had three extra lessons during the week to catch up any work she had not got in her lessons and was able to do much of her homework during the school day. I do think it is extremely brave of the school to go against the government requirements and I am extremely grateful to her school for allowing her to have a different timetable from all the other children in year eight.

I know that both my girls and I are looking forward to the summer holidays, roll on Friday.