speech therapy update

Samuel began his limited 16 sessions of speech therapy at Children's Care on March 10th. Like I said before, it was pretty basic. She was just trying to get him to say sounds using these picture cards of short words. Especially the sounds P, T, N at the ends of words. He leaves off the ends of pretty much all of his words. Since we only have so few sessions, she copied the cards for me and we're supposed to go over them with him. It's helped! 

Also because we can't keep seeing her indefinitely, she strongly suggested we check with the school system to see what their options were. I was a little hesitant of that, but she was certain he needed more help than she could give him and it's far too expensive for us to pay. So after another evaluation by the school district and a meeting to determine what option would be the best, we made a decision. The options were to have a school speech therapist come to our house, take Samuel to a school to see one of their therapists or enroll him in the Communications Preschool just down the road from us. My first choice was just to have a therapist come to the house but we were unsure if that would be adequate help. It was the same problem with going to a school. So we decided to enroll Samuel in the preschool. 

I attended the entire first hour and a half session with him on April 22nd and it went really great. Samuel wasn't afraid at all, the class was very small (six others) and the teacher (Kim) was fantastic. 

Here Kim in explaining their homework. Samuel loves working on it.

Even though the first session went well, I was still a little unsure if we'd keep doing it. But after talking to our therapist at Children's Care, who I've grown to respect, I feel okay about it. She said that the program was wonderful and was glad he could be in it. I also overheard another one of the mom's talking to Kim about how much her son has improved and that was encouraging. So I'm really hoping this will help Samuel. Terry and I have been noticing his speech improving. Not sure if that's due to the help he's been getting or just his own timing. Too soon to tell perhaps. But I'm hopeful!

Samuel has to wear a backpack to "school" where he can store his speech notebook (which contains homework for us to work on). He liked it so much that he wore it around the house for a couple days, like this one when he was going to play outside one afternoon.

A boy, his backpack and his dog.