What do your speech-language therapists normally do with little ones who aren't talking yet? I have some idea of what speech therapists do with adults, but I don't really know what they do with babies. I am familiar with the feeding therapy side of it, but not the language part. So far, I can't tell that they're doing anything that we don't normally do.

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Maresa,
Mom to Alisa (10-29-2008) DS, complete AV canal repair on 3-6-09

We started Lucy's speech therapy at six months old. We did a lot of oral motor therapy. She had a vibrating teething star, a nuk brush, and a z-vibe, all meant to stimulate her mouth muscles. We also did facial massage.

Somewhere in the first six months of therapy we started straw drinking and chewing. We went through a lot of Gerber puffs in speech therapy!

We began introducing signs at six months, as well. Eat, more, and please were the first ones if I remember correctly. We also did some verbal exercises, for example we played games that promoted verbal turn taking. If Lucy would babble "bah, bah, bah", I would we would mimic her, to get her to understand imitation. We played in front of the mirror a lot, too. Making sounds and funny faces. We sang songs, especially ones with movements like the Itsy Bitsy Spider, and If You're Happy And You Know It. And, of course, Lucy's favorite, we looked at a lot of books! We pointed at common objects and told stories (not necessarily the text of the book) about the various pictures.

That's all I can really remember, but if more comes to me, I'll be sure to share.

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~Courtney
{Lucy, 3, Ds, AVSD repaired 1/08; Brodie, 1}

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You too? I thought I was the only one!" -CS Lewis

It was mostly feeding therapy, we had decided to do signing already. Also, some facial massage, which I'm terrible at doing - I swear I've only done it like 3 times, ever! I think alot of "speech therapy" is doing stuff you would already do, just emphasis on the muscle side of it at this point!

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Kasey, mom to Paige (2!)

Ethan has been seeing his ST since around 5 months old. The first year we mainly concentrated on learning signing and started of with really basic signs to encorporate into our daily routine. Ethan also did activities to promote his oral motor development..........blowing bubbles and whistles, copying me do silly faces in the mirror, getting Ethan to immitate certain sounds and facial massage.

We also use Downsed See & Learn programme which was introduced by our ST and is designed to promote speech and language skills

http://www.seeandlearn.org/en/gb/default.aspx

See & Learn is a nice, simple activity to do and has really helped with Ethan's signing.

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Jo, Mum to Georgia 11/11/03 ( BIG High School Musical fan) and Ethan 16/12/07 (DS)

Take a peak at http://teachmetotalk.com and learn what early interventionist should be doing for speech thearpy. Listen to the very first podcast and I think this will help you. There is a lot you can do to promote language and speech.

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Sherry
Evan 10, Olivia 9, and Nate 6*

Hosted on Fotki

all they did with Noah was blow bubbles and play with him...sing songs oh and try to teach him the sign for more (which he still has zero concept of), my almost 2 year old however uses the sign and says "more" all the time...oh well...he'll get it eventually.

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Mom to: Nicholas (May/02), Nathan (April/04), Charlene (June/06), Noah (DS) (May/07), Jesse Lynn (July/08 ), Tessa (Apr/10)

Good question, thanks for asking! I have been thinking about adding a ST to our team now that Kyle is 9 months old and these answers have reinforced my plan.

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-Heidi wife of Kevin and Mom to Nikolai-10, MaryKate-8, Sara-2, and Kyle (T21)-9/27/09