Services: In-Person and Online
Evaluations
Speech-language, literacy, and writing evaluations aim to capture a child’s full range of speech-language functioning and identify strengths and challenges. This process includes family and teacher interviews, understanding the child's point of view, informal activities, and formal testing.
The 4 essentials to a successful evaluation:
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Assessing when your child is most invested in interacting and learning.
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Assessing when your child is most successful.
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Assessing when a task is challenging for your child.
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Assessing how adjustments to language demands affect your child's success rate.
Family and teacher interviews are helpful to gain a perspective of how your child is perceived. Just as important is understanding your child’s point of view and feelings about their world in and out of school. Play, games, and stories are a few of the effective means of engaging children and building rapport. Informal activities that tap into your child’s individual interests create authentic contexts for observing and obtaining examples of oral narratives, functional discourse, and social language skills. Formal testing offers a structured format to analyze your child’s development of specific speech-language skills including but not limited to speech intelligibility, language comprehension, sentence construction, vocabulary, reading, writing, spelling and executive functions. The results of the evaluation are incorporated into a personalized, evidence-based remediation plan that provides the tools and strategies for your child to reach their full potential.
Bilingual Spanish-English evaluations are available and begin with an in-depth interview and language survey of a child’s linguistic exposure and experience over time and across contexts. The evaluation process covers formal and informal testing in both languages.
Therapy rooted in evidence based methodologies
All intervention plans are rooted in evidenced based methodologies to help your child become an effective communicator and learner as well as an empowered self-advocate.
Your child will be provided with a purpose and rationale for learning a
new skill. New concepts will be explicitly introduced and modeled. Your child will have the opportunity to apply their new learning under guided practice until mastery is achieved.
A team approach to speech-language therapy that includes teachers and parents facilitates a child’s generalization of new skills and strategies. School Interactions may include classroom observations, team meetings, and regular check-ins with teachers and other professionals. Parents and caregivers are encouraged to be involved in the therapy process and are a valued resource for reinforcement of skills and progress monitoring at home and in other environments.
School-Age and Adolescence
Therapy plans for school-age students focus on the language, social, and academic skills he or she needs to succeed in school and extra-curricular activities. Sessions address his or her individual learning needs within the context of his or her school curriculum. Interventions prioritize developing higher-order language skills, such as figurative language, inferencing, and comprehension monitoring, improving literacy skills, and building narrative and expository writing skills.
Therapy plans for adolescents focus on compensatory strategies tailored to the individual’s learning profile. The student’s investment in the application of these strategies creates an intrinsic motivation to have agency in their own learning process that will carry them through college and maximize their strengths. Through weekly in-person and online sessions students develop learning strategies, study skills, and self-reliance by experiencing how to effectively acquire and use information in a variety of contexts. Classroom assignments provide repeated opportunities to apply and generalize strategies and skills for learning academic content.
Specialized speech-language pathology services unlock the potential to embark on a journey toward confident and effective communication and learning.
