Speak Freely is proud to lead the speech program for DSACT! We are now approaching our 3rd year of the speech program and every January we get so excited to meet all the new families that have been accepted into the program.

The speech program is designed to assist parents in comprehending where their child’s speech clarity deficits lie, where to start addressing these deficits, how to use various cueing strategies to aid carry-over of correct productions as well as how to deal with behaviors that may arise during all of these tasks.

Each year the main objectives are customized for the groups of children that enter the program, but we always address three main areas:

Oral – motor movement for accurate sound production support

Articulation practice for improved clarity

Resonance support and practice to decrease hypernasal productions

The results of the program have been extremely positive, with most of the families seeing progress in their child’s speech sound productions.  Parents work along side the speech therapists to learn strategies and then, through a stair step program, they learn how to carry out the homework.  The Speech Program is designed to provide a great deal of support initially and then lessen the support over time as the families build their independence.  Eventually, in the third year of the program, we are just checking on the families as they work on the 6 month goals we have established for them.

We have learned that parents want to learn these skills, many had no knowledge of how to address their child’s speech clarity and that the children gain not only speech skills, but often expand their expressive language and utterance length as well.  Many families report their children have gained a great deal of confidence in communicating compared to when they started the program.

We are ready for the 2017 program to start and are excited to help 18 more families!

The Speak Freely Team