If you haven’t already made your summer camp reservations for your children then you had better get started. Many of the best summer camps are already filled up for prime weeks and placing children on waiting lists, incase someone cancels. Some of the specialty camps may only offer one or two weeks to choose from over the entire summer making those spots more difficult to come by. Recently, I came across a list of summer camps available throughout the continental United States for children and adults with communication disorders.... more

Would you be surprised to learn that one out of every 278 children have Cerebral Palsy (CP)? CP is the most common cause of childhood motor disabilities. CP rates are higher among boys, black Americans, and low to middle-income families. The study looked at eight-year-old children in 2002 in three different states in the U.S. A problem in the brain causes CP. This problem affects children’s ability to control their muscles. The part of the body affected depends on where the problems are in the brain. While genetic conditions may cause cerebral palsy it can also... more

The last time that LuLu went to speech therapy provided by the public school she was in kindergarten. (When I said that to this speech therapist today, she was truly blown away, and just kept asking “why did they stop?”) Now here we are six years later, and today we went for her first speech therapy session through the virtual academy. Even though she’s been enrolled since November, it has taken the school awhile locate and contract with private providers.

Now a gun-shy mom like myself, who has been extremely burned by public schools could have gotten a bit nervous... more

Cocooned at home with LuLu yesterday, we tuned into Oprah once we’d run out of all of LuLu’s favorite flicks. There we saw Priscilla Dunstan, a mom from Australia, who has discovered five sounds that infants make universally to communication with the world. Ms. Dunstan, who has a gift for understanding emotions and feeling behind language, has tested her theory of a universal baby language on over 1000 infants from many cultures, races and languages. She has found that infants from... more

In part one I was telling you about my daughter’s speech problems with enunciation, sentence structure, and using the correct form of a noun or a verb in her sentences. Sometimes it can be very frustrating for her when she is trying to communicate a thought, but it can also be very frustrating for the listener, which is usually me, trying to figure out what she is saying.

So I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that these problems also show up in her written work. She will frequently leave out words in her sentences. One of her favorite words to leave out is am. For example, her sentence would say, “I singing beautifully.”

She also will forget to use the plural form... more

When my daughter came to live with us, just a few weeks prior to her fourth birthday, I was the only person in our home that could understand her. I served as her interpreter at home, at church and at clinics when she began going for various assessments. It was clear to everyone that she really had a lot to say, she just didn’t know how. I’m sure it was very frustrating not having her need met, maybe that’s one of the reasons she never seemed to listen.

Initially the pediatrician ordered a complete battery of hearing test at our local rehabilitation hospital to rule out hearing loss. Her hearing was found to be within normal range. So she was scheduled for individual speech... more