Own Your Voice Speech-Language Therapy, PLLC

05/01/2024

Love pairing my cards with books. Here I paired their Lateralization deck with the book “I’m a Dirty Dinosaur” to target a frontal lisp.

As we read the book, I asked the little one to identify all the words that had the “flat tire” sound /s/, which were so many: slide, sniff, s***f, snail, face, stomp, dinosaur etc. Every time she found a target word she produced 5-10 trials of each. We got a ton of trials.

She worked so hard to not produce her old “snake sound,” but whenever she did I would bring these cards up along with verbal prompts or a semantic cue and they worked like a charm!

This book is silly, fun and includes lots of movement, which made the session pretty active and productive.

02/25/2024

Our website is now live!!

Own Your Voice Speech- Language Therapy, PLLC is a bilingual private practice that provides high quality, family centered, play-based, and neurodiversity affirming speech, receptive and expressive language and feeding therapy services to the pediatric population.

01/10/2024

Hey there! I’m ecstatic to announce that I have been selected to be a creator! I am thrilled, pinch me😅

I’ve been using bjorem speech cue cards in my speech therapy sessions for a while now. They are easily my favorite speech therapy tool and I simply love them!

Stay tuned for all the fun ways in which I will be incorporating these in my therapy sessions.

01/01/2024

Happy New Year! May this year be full of new connections, growth, love, health and happiness for you and yours. ✨

11/23/2023

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

Thank you for being here.

Forever grateful for the opportunities this platform has offered me.

07/20/2023

🗣️Communicative temptations are great to create natural opportunities for children to communicate!

Here are a a few ideas:

✨Place their preferred foods, or toys within their visual field but out of reach. This can look like putting a toy on the table, top shelves or inside a plastic container they cannot open. When your kid communicates via any means (looking, pointing, reaching, vocalizing, naming etc) respond by modeling the phrase you think they would say if they could: “car,” “open car” as you give it to them

✨Play with a toy that is hard to operate. Hand it to them and wait for any sign that communicates they need assistance. Respond and model functional words.

✨Do something unexpected by changing your routine. For example, pretend to forget to put on your child’s diaper/underwear during dress time, give your child a plate with no spoon etc. Once your child reacts in any way, such as looking confused, smiling, vocalizing, et., model language that matches your child’s reaction or add to their productions.

✨Give your child only a little of a requested item/food, so they are tempted to request for more. Once your child returns for more model a word/phrase that matches their action: “more cookie.”

✨Choices: When your child communicates they want a toy, food etc., by pulling you and bringing you to the fridge for example, provide two choices even if you know what they want, holding it next to your face, with an expectant look. As soon as your child communicates by reaching, looking, pointing etc., which item they want, label the item 1-2 times depending on your child and hand it to them.

🗣️Please don’t withhold the items until your child produces the expected word, or ask them to say/repeat anything. Communication should never be forced. Simply model, model, model. These are simply techniques to promote communication.

You can use these same opportunities to model using a low or high tech Alternative and augmentative communication if applicable.

06/12/2023

Wind up toys are so great to stimulate your child’s language development.

✨I love them because they are a natural way to tempt communication. They are motivating and repetitive, providing lots of natural opportunities for your child to want to communicate.

✨You can target prelinguistic skills, functional/power words, animal sounds, environmental sounds, actions, utterance length, receptive language or any other goal!

✨When introducing it for the first time, the child never knows what it’s going to do, immediately catching their attention, and stimulating shared engagement.

✨Given the child often needs help to operate it, you can play it, pair it with a verbal routine or a symbolic sound, and when it stops give your child an expectant look and wait for any sign, vocalization, gesture, or any type of communication. Respond by modeling a word/phrase that matches the child’s communicative effort and repeat the process!

💕You can also pair it with any other toy and activity for lots of fun!

I still haven’t met a kiddo who doesn’t love wind up toys.

Give these a try!