This is something that has been churning in my brain since our last EI visit at the beginning of the month. After I asked ds's EI teacher about doing a speech evaluation on ds she wrote on the report form for the visit that "thinking skills and language skills usually parallel". Ds has zero words at 17 months even though the EI teacher claims a grunt is ds's vocalization of more in response to her asking and signing more. During our conversation the teacher indicated that she didn't think ds would qualify for speech due to not having a large enough discrepancy between his thinking and language skills. How would you interpret the note on the visit report? Is she claiming that his grunts and vowel sound only vocalizations ARE words and therefore his language skills are higher or is she saying that she believes his thinking skills are lower?
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Re: How would you understand this? Updated
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Regarding ds grunting to be a vocal response to more....I would have an easier time agreeing if that was how he usually responded but it's not. Normally he doesn't respond at all. We did have him evaluated by private Speech.....an interesting event to watch. The SLP held out two objects, I.e. the eyes and the nose from Mr. Potatohead and asked ds which one was the eyes.. Ds identified the item requested correctly enough for me to say it's not a fluke. She'd tell him to put the item in the box and he would. As a result of observing the speech evaluation, dh and I have started to realize that he has learned and is learning more than we thought. I knew he understood more language that he expresses based on his response (stop crying) to me telling him I'm getting his cup/bottle when he'd cry his hungry cry. I hadn't thought about if he was learning body parts and animals and animal sounds because no one had worked with him, or taught us to, in manner that allowed him to express what he knows before that evaluation. I did know that it's good to name things for babies/toddlers as you use the items and as part of play so I have been doing that for a while. Ds has Down Syndrome so we already know there is some level of intellectual disability AND we know ds has hypotonia in his core muscles and mouth muscles. Language is more than talking but speech also includes being able to position the mouth to make the sounds necessary for speech and that is something ds cannot do. He's already a year behind typical peers in making speech sounds. The only speech sounds he produces consistently are vowel sounds. I don't know.....it's just that different conversations over the past 6 months are really leaving dh and I questioning the services provided by the school district and really seriously considering what our options are.
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Spending a few minutes playing with my son and telling him this is a blue block and this is a red block......let's put the red block on the blue block is hardly developmentally inappropriate for a toddler....nor is adding colors and other descriptive words while talking to ds about the world around you. That's what I mean by teaching him his colors......Consciously adding colors to descriptions when talking to ds. I do the same thing with the alphabet....until my letters refused to stick to the wall I had them up on a wall we walked past frequently and I would stop and point to one of the letters and say it's name and sound.
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