Speech therapy is one of the most important services we can give our children who have T21. However, in many states homeschoolers do not have access to publicly funded speech therapy services. Private speech therapy services are a wonderful option if you can afford them. Even then, sometimes the waiting list to get into private services are long.
Another option, which we benefitted from, is to find a university that has a graduate program for speech language pathologists. These programs need children for their graduate students to gain experience with. These services are generally much more affordable than private services and the sessions are usually supervised by highly experienced therapists. I learned so much by watching my son’s speech therapy sessions and having weekly conversations with my son’s speech supervisor at Loyola College. Having served the Down Syndrome population for over 30 years, she had a wealth of knowledge and experience which she so generously shared. Knowing my son needed daily speech practice, I would take note of everything the therapists did during each session and find similar resources to practice the skills he was working on in therapy at home.
When it comes to the acquisition of language skills, time is not on our side. Because plasticity of the brain is greatest when children are young, I try to prioritize speech, targeting specific skills and working on them in a structured and non-structured way every day. Generally, children with T21 have so much to work on in order to develop their speech skills, from articulation to receptive and expressive language, to grammar and semantics, and so on.
So, in the event that your child has no or not enough access to speech therapy, I’m sharing some of the speech therapy resources my son and I have found most helpful. I am not a speech language pathologist, but most of these resources have been designed by SLPs and are quite straight forward to use.
Continue reading “Our Favorite Speech Therapy Resources for Young Children with Down Syndrome”
