Since my last update, Z has now had two sessions with Early Intervention. It would have been three, but the speech pathologist needed to reschedule our session today, which actually was pretty poor timing since this was the first week that I dropped Z’s second session of private therapy. My thought was that he should hopefully be covered by one session of private therapy and one EI session each week. I’m not sure how valid that idea is, though, because the two seem completely dissimilar.
I’m trying not to be too judgmental, since it’s only been two weeks plus I’m trying to be less judgmental in general these days. Still, I have to say that I’m a bit surprised by how EI is going so far. The speech pathologist has been interacting very little with Z and seems more focused on working around Z’s speech problems than on them. It makes me wonder if EI is always that way, or if it’s just the speech pathologist we’re working with. She’s a perfectly nice woman, but has been out of EI for years and literally just returned. Meanwhile, she spent much of the time in between working on alternative communication methods. She’s relearning the EI process, paperwork, etc. and getting to know us at the same time. Maybe it will just take more time for things to click. It makes me wonder if I should go back to taking Z to private therapy twice a week in the meantime.
A number of people have come by my blog looking for more about initial consonant deletion, probably because there is just so little information out there about it. I suppose it being atypical means it gets little attention, quite similar to giftedness, actually! I’ve found very little online about how to work with initial consonant deletion, except for some activities that involve rhyming words. The idea seems to be to have the child focus on a set of words with the same ending to learn that he/she must differentiate between them somehow (adding initial sound). This may work great for older children, but for my 27 month old it’s not helpful yet.
What has worked somewhat is majorly de-emphasizing the ends of words. So “boat” becomes “BOOOOOOOOat”, with the end of the word almost a whisper. This seems to help Z focus on the beginning sounds and not get bogged down with the end. He’s been able to segment his words this way after modelling – “Boa-t”, where the opposite “B-oat” is too difficult for him. I find it interesting, because logic would seem to dictate that if he’s leaving off the first consonant to try to get him to say that alone and then tack on the rest of the word. We tried for a while with the “B-B-B-B-oat” business and he’d have none of it. He’d just repeat “oat, oat, oat” and ignore the “B”. So now we’re segmenting like “Beeee-d”, “behhh-d”, “booo-m”.
Although we’ve found some success in this strategy, Z still leaves off the beginnings of a lot of words and requires a lot of modeling to segment. He’s improved the most with “H” and “W” starting words and can now say “hat” instead of “at” and “wet” instead of “et”. The therapist spent a lot of time on those sounds, using Kaufman cards and he now uses those beginning sounds quite consistently on his own. He seems to struggle the most with bilabials, like the B examples above.
While I haven’t been able to find many resources about initial consonant deletion, there are at least a number of references to it in Treating Phonological Disorders in Children by Howell and Dean. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find this book at the library, so was only able to catch bits and pieces of it from the Amazon preview. If I come across other resources, I’ll try to post them here for those who are interested.
