All About Speech Therapy

[ChiefKiasu]

mango:

... We tot that the problem will resolve by itself as he grows older but he is going to P1 next year and there is no sign of improvement.


any advice?

I recall vaguely that buds has encountered similar cases before in her teaching career. Perhaps you can wait until our night owl wakes from her slumber to do a bit of diagnostics for you. Regardless, you might want to consider sending your son to a professional speech therapist to do proper evaluation and prognosis. I agree it is worrying if his condition extends beyond the age of 6.

[hardworking_mom]

I had similar problem with my child too. Currently he is on speech therapy with kk child development unit(cdu) at sengkang branch. A lot of prounciation deals with mouth muscle, lips and tongue movement. It is best to get professional advice as they will do an assesment using some standard test before starting on the therapy sessions. A lot of boys seem to have such problems. I was and am still worried 'cos my child, attending P1 next year will need to attend oral exam. How is he only to adapt to pri sch life if his communication skills are no good? Now I will keep reminding him how to prounce clearly and correctly using those skills learnt from the therapy sessions. There will be result but takes time.

[mango]

Chief and hardworking_mom,


Thanks for your reply.
I will call up KK to enquire abt the speech therapy.

[Funz]

Go to polyclinic first to get a referral. Else they will charge you private patient rates. Diff can be as high as $100 for consultation.

[kaydenbrown]

Just some suggestions, this site seems to have a couple of games that could help in speech development.

http://www.juniorsweb.com/slp/index.asp

I also thought these tongue twisters in another language might work for your child. http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/sk.htm

Certain pronunciations can be honed through another language sometimes.

[buds]

mango:

I am looking for ways to improve my son's pronunciation.

He can't speak clearly, for example he will say 'a' for ask, 'mas' for 'must'. When he is speaking mandarin, he will pronounce 'gui' as 'dui' etc.

He only started to speak at the age of 3 and all along his pronunciation had been way off. His teacher did mention that they have difficulties understanding him when he first joined the kindergarten but they got used to his way of speaking after some time.

We tot that the problem will resolve by itself as he grows older but he is going to P1 next year and there is no sign of improvement.

any advice?

ChiefKiasu:

I recall vaguely that buds has encountered similar cases before in her teaching career. Perhaps you can wait until our night owl wakes from her slumber to do a bit of diagnostics for you. Regardless, you might want to consider sending your son to a professional speech therapist to do proper evaluation and prognosis. I agree it is worrying if his condition extends beyond the age of 6.

Wuaah, your memory not bad, Chief.

Mango, from your observation that this has
been going on since child is 3 years old up
to now coming 6 years old is kinda a long
wait for resolve-by-itself time-frame...

Hope you will be able to help your child fix
it soonest possible!

I've had a few experiences with children
with this problem. For a handful of them, we
managed to detect the early deficiency from
sounds activity and realized the child actually
is unable to hear sounds very clearly. To the
child, the sounds sounded more muffled-like,
and maybe could hear only the initial sounds
uttered by someone or something..

Another problem could be the inborn length of
tongue. Short tongued kiddies may not be able
to pronounce some sounds clearly... Even if they
do, it takes up a helluva effort and at times they
can even speak with spitting-saliva moments just
to consciously correct the way they speak to match
the normal kid's way of speech and pronunciation...

If your child is exposed to phonetic sounds during
the kindy years, try asking him/her to sound out
the individual letter sounds. Observe how that goes..

Ask your child to listen for loud and soft sounds.
Easily done with an empty bottle filled with beans
or seeds and rice... Make two of each and get child
to match the two SAME sound bottles.

If the chances are that child is not hearing properly,
(in your initial home observation) you can choose to
visit the ear, nose, throat specialise ie. ENT specialist.

In some of my students' cases a minor day op was in
need and the use of a hearing aid until hearing ability
improves.

Children who may have difficulty hearing well, may
speak with hollow post-nasal sounds in their noses
and throats... like when you pinch your nose and
try to speak kinda sound...

And yes, if you think it's speech therapy that you
need cos you think the primary issue is really the
way the child speaks then go through referral for
better savings.

Speech therapy may not work for all kiddies tho..
And i've encountered parents who find that the
therapy sessions carry on for a tad too long
without much improvements...

[mama_mia]

Hi


I am looking for a speech therapy centre for my girl, 4yrs old.

My girl had difficulty speech language disabilty, meaning she could understand, listen, but she has difficulty to process the info. and express it out. Hence, she pretty much kept to herself when she goes to new environment, meet new ppl. etc. and also tear easily. She needs audio promter or visual promptor to help express herself. What will happen in the future when she needs to attend main stream school? She may have difficulty during oral exam, or listening comprehension.

She had been following up at the CDU, KKH and also Speech therapy, HPB(near to SGH). But the waiting time is simply killing! nine mths to see doc, maybe once a month to see therapy. I had looked for private therapy centre, but when the therapist had an emergency C-section, her appt. becomes irregular so we stopped.

Now, i need to re-start the therapy session for her, so really, any good recommendation is really really appreciated. :?:
Thanks.

[mama_mia]

Hi Mango


Have you managed to secure an appt. with KKH CDU?

If you are pressing for an assessment for your kid, KKH’s waiting time is too long. Why i say so, because i had to wait for 6-9mths for an appt. with a doc for my kid! Subsequently have to wait for appt to see therapist, the waiting time is the killing one.

You may want to consider private for initial assessment in parallel.

[eventful]

If anyone is interested, there is an upcoming speech therapy day public forum on 1st Nov. That may answer some of your questions about speech difficulties.

[Blessedmum]

In fact my son, going P1 next year too, has some articualtion problem. Last year we brought him to sort therpy in KK (the queue wasn;t that bad). He couldn’t pronounce ‘S’ properly and I got worried for a then 5 yo. But surprisingly, just before the appt, he could sound the ‘s’ better. Anyway we went ahead with the accessment. We were told his problem was quite minor. We stopped going. Now, his ‘s’ is better but he talks like he has alot of saliva in his mouth which makes his speech not as clear. MIL told me that as long as we keep reminding him to swallow saliva, he should be better. But his going P1 next year and there will be oral… Should I bring him back to see a theropist again?