Therapy Methods
Chatterboxes' therapists use a variety of techniques in order to provide effective, enjoyable therapy. Therapy involves motivating games, home training materials, manipulatives and computer programs to make sessions appealing to all children.
The following approaches will be tailored to each family/child's specific needs and may be used in combination:
Prompt© Technique
Prompts for restructuring oral motor targets; a tactile cueing method used to enhance the production of certain sounds, sound combinations and single words to connected speech.
Kaufman Method for Childhood Apraxia
The Kaufman Speech Praxis Treatment Approach is a highly effective set of techniques used to move a child from unintelligible speech into intelligible speech. It involves the reinforcement of successive approximations and employs phonological processes at a slightly higher level than the child's current level.
Hanen Program® (Parent Training Workshops)
- It Takes Two to Talk: Registration now open for spring workshop
- Learning Language and Loving It (coming soon)
- More than Words (coming soon)
Baby Signs®
The Baby Signs® Program teaches babies to use simple, easy-to-do gestures for communicating with their parents and caregivers. These gestures or "signs" represent an item or concept, like "cat," "eat," or "all gone." Using signs gives babies a way to "talk" with their parents, before they can talk. Babies can communicate about the world around them, long before they have mastered their verbal speaking skills!
Earobics Programs
A computer based program with hundreds of levels of instruction built into the software. Each level is specially developed to help students build critical literacy skills, including recognizing and blending sounds, rhyming, and discriminating phonemes within words.
Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS)
The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is an augmentative communication system developed to help individuals quickly acquire a functional means of communication (Bondy and Frost, 1994). PECS is appropriate for individuals who do not use speech or who may speak with limited effectiveness: those who have articulation or motor planning difficulties, limited communicative partners or a lack of initiative in communication.
Locotour Articulation
The computer based software encourages practice of speech sounds by making the practice interesting. Listening to the word in isolation, the sounds of the word, the word in a phrase, and in a sentence allows practice at appropriate levels of complexity.
Auditory Bombardment
Auditory bombardment is a procedure in which the child is provided with intensified, repeated, systematic exposure to multiple exemplars of phonological targets and contrasts.