Velcro Boy's Speech Progress

Hi everyone,

I realized it's been some time since I've posted about VB's progress. He's adjusting well to his class. He likes his teacher and she says he's interacting well with the other kids (all 6 of them) and talking quite a bit more than before.

She works on a sound for a few days, then moves onto a new one while still stressing the other sounds previously covered. This way they cycle through the sounds over and over again, eventually building to mastery. So far they've worked on /w/, /t/, /s/, /c/k/, /d/, /h/ and a few others that I'm forgetting. They're also stressing "closing your words", where the ending sound is stressed in pronunciation. When saying single words, he's quite a bit more understandable than before. But when telling a story or saying a sentence, he reverts to the old way of running the sounds and words together. This is normal. His teacher says they work first on individual words, the work up from there.

Several exercises have been sent home. Including a few matching cards. One day we sat down to play (I combined the ones that she sent home into one big set) and VB wanted to lay out the first set of cards. Little smartie sets them up like the game Memory! I let him go first. He flips two cards. Then I go, also flipping 2 cards. His turn again. Well, he figured out that he could see the picture through the card (it was printed on plain paper)! So he cleans up all the matches! Stinker.

So, progress is being made. It's slow, very slow. The goal is to get him to "normal" by the end of the school year ~June 3rd. He was evaluated at about half of that. This program is his best chance of meeting that goal. I spoke with his teacher about what would happen if therapy needed to be continued into the next school year. She wasn't too clear on the Kindergarten aspect of it, but she did say that the therapist would work with him (and others at the same time) for about 90 minutes each week. That's probably not 90 consecutive minutes. More like 30 minutes 3 times per week. In a group. Not one on one. Which means progress could/would slow considerably. In the meantime it also means public school Kindergarten attendance. This may not be what we want for him. I mentioned summer school. She said that's about 30 minutes per week and it's usually reserved for the most needy kids, those with autism and other handicaps. So I don't think it's an option for him. Please pray that he makes the necessary strides quickly.