Book Recommendation -- Early Communication Skills

[Lecka]

I was browsing in the library yesterday, and came across a book about Early Communication Skills for children with Down Syndrome.

 

Wow!  It is packed full of great information.  

 

I found a lot of information about speech sounds and phonological processes, and ideas to work on them, that would have helped me with my older son.  I barely ever see any information about this.

 

Then, there is a ton of information that is pertinent for my younger son with autism.  

 

It says that any speech/language issue that a child with Down Syndrome may have, any other child may also have.  

 

So -- it is just a great book for a lot of speech therapy or speech/language/communication information.  It has a lot of information together, that I have not seen together.  

 

In chapter 9: Articulation and Phonology:  Learning the Sounds of the Language, she talks about "traditional articulation therapy" and then the kind that is teaching kids the sounds.  This is *exactly* what my older son had, and the best information I have seen in book form so far.  

 

Nothing has been new to me, but it is a lot of things I have pieced together from different places, and it is nice and convenient to see it together, and helpful to remember things and see how the authors talks about them.  I am really impressed, though.

 

I really think it is the best overview I have seen of "so, your child is in speech therapy, what does it all mean."  It does not take away, for me, that it is also all about Down Syndrome, that may just be by chance of how my kids are, but I was not expecting to find so much good information in a book labelled "Down Syndrome."  I will be reading more Down Syndrome books!  It is also nice to be able to read a book and not find that it is full of polarizing opinions of other treatments besides the one the book is promoting, which I get frequently with autism books, and which I am so tired of.  

[Crimson Wife]

Thanks for the book rec! I'll have to see if I can locate a copy to preview.

 

ITA agree about the politics being a distraction. If I thought the ones surrounding autism were bad, the ones surrounding deaf & hard-of-hearing issues are even worse :-( Maybe it's just the homeschooler in me, but I don't understand why people think there has to be a "one size fits all" answer rather than looking at each child's unique set of circumstances.

[MistyMountain]

Interesting about the info about speech therapy that teaches sounds and traditional. Teaching ds sounds is exactly what helped my ds learn to talk and then helped him with articulation as a preschooler. He didn't really need the techniques they used in EI but they told me to teach him how to make sounds and once he picked up the sounds he started talking. Then he had an articulation issue and his ST taught him how to make difficult sounds and it worked.

[PeterPan]

Our SLP does PROMPT on children with Downs.  I assume that means in some cases the speech issues are caused by praxis, which would explain why traditional isn't breaking through. You're right though that no one is putting PROMPT out there for parents to do themselves.  I've seen the level 1 manual, but you'd need some background in speech production to understand it.