Day: January 15, 2022

When working with your child on increasing your child’s ability to functionally communicate at home, it is important to focus on words that are going to be most effective across a variety of environments and activities.  While nouns (e.g., cookie, star) and politeness terms (e.g., please, thank you) are important, the most effective and research-based words to focus on for early talkers are pronouns, verbs, and prepositions, otherwise known as “core vocabulary.” Studies have shown that these words make up 89% of a typically developing preschoolers vocabulary.  Let’s think about why these words are so effective.  Imagine you are playing cars with your child and your child says “car.” You are likely to interpret that to mean that your child

  Dysregulation affects how children (and their caregivers) interact with their environment and other individuals. Difficulty with sensory processing affects how many children process their environment and can present in various ways (increased energy, quickly moving throughout their environment, or slow, passive wandering with reduced energy). It is important to attempt to reach optimal arousal in order to encourage learning; this can be done by trying to assess a child’s arousal level and attempting to either increase their arousal by providing input or reducing their level of arousal by decelerating into a calm state. Start by asking yourself, “Can I adjust my own energy level to affect the child?” Jessie Ginsburg, CCC-SLP provides strategies to alter states of arousal in