Summer's Journey

I would love to share the attached video of Lori Overland, a renowned Speech Therapist who specialises in children's oral motor, feeding and speech difficulties. In my previous post, I mentioned the reasons for the lack of success in oromotor therapy for some children. I also added that in addition to oromotor tools, PROMPT and NDT approaches are often used in my treatment of articulation difficulties (may it be muscle-based difficulties or motor-planning difficulties). This video captures exactly what I am trying to say: Lori Overland (the featured Speech Therapist) assessed Nathan (the featured child) using Talktools and Ark's oromotor tools. She looked into jaw strength and gradation, as well as lip-jaw and tongue-jaw dissociation. She also assessed the child's feeding skills, despite the lack of strong evidence in the link between feeding skills and speech. Lori's feeding assessment showed that Nathan does have feeding problems (his feeding skills are funct...

In this entry, I will share with you why the therapy approaches mentioned in my previous post 'Don't Give Up Mummy!'  did not work for YS. Oromotor Exercises: Often, oromotor exercises with therapy tools have been prescribed to children without a good understanding of the child's difficulties which led to speech problems. There have been quite a lot of commercialized tools that come with thick manuals, instructing us how to use those tools step-by-step for 'speech development'. I love using these tools and they have been very effective in my therapy. However, there is no manual which teaches us how to diagnose each child's difficulty, nor is there a manual which teach us how to transit the oromotor skills to speech. We need professional knowledge and clinical judgement to tease out the specific cause of a child's speech problem and how to transit the oromotor skills to speech. For speech, we have to look at jaw stability, lip dissociation and tong...