Speech Therapy

Memories of speech therapy made me seek out psychological therapy later in life.

Overall, it was a horrible experience for me. To answer the OP's question, we focused on nearly all of the sounds. I sat there and repeated (if I could) whatever the SLP was saying. Boring. Then I put a star by my name on a chart...never knew what the purpose of it was. I stopped going in 7th grade...lied my way out of it by joining choir, of all things. Ironically, choir helped my speech improve tremendously.
 
I've had two speech therapists that I've been seeing for a long time. from ~3 years old till 15ish. I still had refresher courses until I went to college, but it was also to see her as a friend. (I still speak to both of them.)

What we did varied with age. From 3-5 years old, it was mostly puzzle games. No speech correction other than asking me to say the full sentence (i.e. Say "I would like to have that sticker, please." instead of "THAT ONE!"). From 5-8ish years old, it was more about building my vocabulary and learning how to say them. Then afterwards, it was about speech correction. I would recite essays and she would correct me if I said something wrong.

It was fun and incredibly useful for me.
 
I had speech therapy all the way from kindergarten to high school graduation, every week or every other week. We only focused on the sibilant sounds, since I was unable to hear them after the age of 5, but all other speech sounds formed naturally for me, even though I now hear nothing past 1000hz (slope begins at 250hz).

I can't say I enjoyed speech therapy, though I did have a couple of good therapists who made it fun. The big issue for me was that I would be pulled out of my regular classroom and had to go across the school to the speech therapist's room, and it always made me self-conscious and feel different from the other kids, especially when they would ask me, "Where did you go?" I never knew how to explain it to them without feeling like I was retarded or something, so I usually just gave a vague answer about meeting with a teacher.

When I was in high school, we focused more on vocabulary (like Daredevel). We used SAT vocab words and practice exercises, so I was simultaneously studying for the test and working on my speech at the same time. It was very useful, and for that I will always be thankful to my therapist.
 
But in primary school I did have informal speech therapy, it was not by a SALT but it was by the TOD who was also the deputy head of the school. She used to pull each child one at a time out of class once a week or so, and used to take us to her room. We used to play games and just talk to her. She used to video us so we could see our progress. I used to love it.

Also we had an additional speech lesson 1-1 with our class teacher on a friday mornings.

But the weird thing is that I only had proper SALT AFTER I got implanted and not before.
 
Daredevel7 said:
I've had two speech therapists that I've been seeing for a long time. from ~3 years old till 15ish. I still had refresher courses until I went to college, but it was also to see her as a friend. (I still speak to both of them.)

What we did varied with age. From 3-5 years old, it was mostly puzzle games. No speech correction other than asking me to say the full sentence (i.e. Say "I would like to have that sticker, please." instead of "THAT ONE!"). From 5-8ish years old, it was more about building my vocabulary and learning how to say them. Then afterwards, it was about speech correction. I would recite essays and she would correct me if I said something wrong.

It was fun and incredibly useful for me.
Click to expand...

That is what all of Miss Kat's speech has been like. They also sing a lot, read books and play games. All for building vocab and helping her to use spoken language appropriatly, and to listen to what the other person is saying.
 
Speech therapy... I have a mixed reaction to it.

I don't like having my speech corrected orally. If it is written out phonetically, then I can correct it. But I don't like it when people say my speech is wrong and try to get me to repeat it without explaining on paper how to say them out.

Now, my early speech therapy was focused on making the right phones, develop self-check methods. That I didn't mind. We didn't really play any games. We focused more on making sounds more than actual vocabulary.

However when I went to a new school under a different group of professionals, all the therapies focused on was saying the words properly. It got me to be such a perfectionist that I shuddered and would cringe or recoil whenever I know I said a word wrong, then be embarrassed by it.

We were told to sit still, not move, be perfectly upright and to be able to say every word properly. I was forbidden from using ASL. At that time, I was introduced to cued speech without being educated on how to read cued speech. So I was baffled at their hand movements. As a result, the progress I made as a kid backslid back to how I was talking before getting speech therapy.

I started to chill out a bit when I was given a different type of therapy, similar to the one I was given when I was a kid before the change in program. There, I learned to be more self-confident. I wasn't disciplined for making a mistake, although I wasn't allowed to advance to another lesson until the therapist felt like I was strong enough to do self-checks on my own. I was encouraged to move around a bit more and use ASL or PSE while talking. In fact, I don't think she ever reprimanded me for having a Plautdietsch accent, which I learned from my mom.
 
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