Speech and Language Therapy

How we can assist

Our speech pathologists specialise in providing evidence-based interventions for spoken and written communication difficulties that affect your child’s ability to join in everyday life.

Whether your child is a toddler or a teenager, our speech pathologists can help with therapy that can make a real difference to your child’s confidence, skills and learning.  We work with children from 12 months to 18 years of age who have difficulties with:

• Speech Articulation: Your child may have difficulties pronouncing or saying some sounds correctly e.g. /th/, /s/ and /r/.
• Phonemic Awareness and Literacy: Your child may have poor sound awareness which can result in poor reading ability and spelling difficulties.  Therapy focuses on segmenting, blending and phonemic manipulation abilities.
• Auditory Processing: Your children may struggle following instructions or have an inability to listen in noisy environments or perhaps struggles remembering information that is given verbally.
• Language: Your child may have a poor grasp of vocabulary and sentence structure and they find it hard to participate in conversations or in a classroom.
• Fluency: Your child may experience stuttering, an involuntary repetition of sound, words, phrases or prolongations.
• Written language: Therapy can help improve your child’s narratives/story writing, procedural and persuasive text writing, while also addressing spelling and sentence structure.
• Improve muscle functioning: Your child may need to improve oral muscle functioning to enhance lip function, or treat a tongue thrust and improve feeding and swallowing problems.

How do I know if my child needs help?

No two children are alike, however there are several key signs that indicate speech therapy may be of benefit to your child.  These include:

• Not meeting developmental milestones i.e. slow to start talking, not using a lot of words for their age.
• Difficulties speaking clearly or hard to understand.
• Frustrated when they can’t get their message across.
• Not following directions and/or instructions.
• Struggling with reading, spelling or comprehension.
• Finding it hard to engage with others and play with children.
• Difficulties with reading or writing (making up words, skipping words, guessing, poorly formed sentences).
• Experiencing a disability which is impacting speech and communication.
• Difficulties drinking or swallowing food.

What to expect

INITIAL CONSULTATION

If required a comprehensive assessment is carried out, including discussions and observations while your child completes aged appropriate tasks.

Once your child’s profile of strengths and difficulties is identified, we will collaborate with you to identify the goals for therapy, which forms the basis of our intervention plan.  During this process, we will ask you to identify the skills and/or behaviours that are the priority to work on, both in the short and long term.

THERAPY SESSIONS

Sessions will focus on working through identified goals and review progress and any homework tasks that has been set in previous sessions.  Play based tasks are incorporated into the session that aims to engage your child based on their interests.

At the end of the session, time is set aside to provide feedback and discuss tasks to practice with your child between sessions.