Year: 2020

Is your child heading back to school? Consider having your child practice wearing a mask for extended periods of time for the last few weeks of summer in order to make the transition easier. Start off by having your child wear a mask during highly preferred activities and increase the length of time in a mask per day. Once your child is comfortable wearing a mask during preferred tasks, incorporate mask wearing into non-preferred activities as well. This will allow your child to slowly ease in to the transition of wearing a mask for a significant portion of the day. Wear a mask with your child during practice time as well!  Wearing a mask can be tiring, especially for kids.

Even in normal times, it can be easy to let screens and technology dominate our lives, and right now, it’s even easier.  During the coronavirus pandemic, as our daily lives have become more digital, kids not only need to use technology for schoolwork, therapy, or camps and classes,  it’s also often their means for social connection with family members and friends. A number of studies have demonstrated that increased screen time can negatively affect children’s mood, sleep and concentration.  Now more than ever, it is important that families balance screen time with non-tech, screen-free activities. Here’s a few ideas for some low-tech family time: Have a weekly game night: Pull out some classic board or card games, or try no-cost

During speech therapy, your speech pathologist will teach your child new speech and language skills needed to further develop their ability to communicate effectively.  It is really important that your child gets many opportunities to practice these new skills outside of the treatment room. It can be difficult to come up with ideas for incorporating your child’s speech goals into their everyday activities.  Here are a few ways you can use daily routines to help your child practice using their verbal skills.  These suggestions focus on increasing intentional communication, requesting, labeling and expanding utterances.  First, make sure your child wants or needs the object or action. Then, he must request it in order to receive it.  This can be at

As face masks are required in most public spaces now, individuals with communication difficulties are challenged in new ways. Face masks alter speech loudness, block facial expressions, and reduce the overall quality of speech. Consider using gestures with your whole body instead of relying on facial expressions to ensure a clear message is conveyed. Also, try to use louder, clear speech whenever possible. Transparent face masks are becoming increasingly more available and are a great option as well. Individuals often rely on lip-reading to aid in their comprehension, so try to supplement this the best you can by using an alternative face mask, visual supports, and reducing background noise. Please visit asha.org for more support regarding face masks.

This summer is turning out a little differently than expected. Many families are finding they have more time at home, and fewer opportunities to socialize with others. For children who are really missing that social engagement and interaction, here are some game ideas to enrich conversational skills, perspective taking, and interpreting nonverbal cues from home! Conversation tokens: Each player contributes to the conversation by asking a question or making a comment and stacks their token on top of the other. You could play with any sort of token that is stackable (e.g., checkers, dominos, cookies). If one of the players says something off-topic or can’t think of something to say, the tower is knocked down. Conversation ball-toss: Each player contributes a comment

As adults, in any given day, we are expected to demonstrate the capacity for wait time (e.g. waiting in line at the grocery store, waiting in traffic, waiting for our food at restaurants, etc.) The ability to exercise self -control and self-regulation through wait time is an important life skill that is shown to first develop in childhood. The capacity for wait time is shown to be closely tied to attention span and memory capacity which evolve as the brain develops with age. Wait time is connected with turn-taking and conversational reciprocity that are relevant in our earliest social experiences with peers and adults. As parents, the importance of wait time in developing self-regulation can be modeled and reinforced for