►► Download my FREE home therapy checklist→ https://www.agentsofspeech.com/checklist

0:00 - 1:07 Introduction
1:08 - 2:23 Is Your Child a Speech or Language Case?
2:24 - 3:41 If s/he is a speech case then…
3:44 - 4:54 What language level is your child?
5:05 - 7:32 Non-verbal children
7:54 - 9:45 Single-word level
10:06 - 12:22 2-3 word level
12:29 - 13:54 Verbal reasoning
14:22 - 16:49 Storytelling
17:06 - 20:14 Social training

Is Your Child a Speech or Language Case?
It’s important to know whether your child has a problem with saying speech sounds correct or has a problem using language. It might be that your child has a problem with both. And knowing this will help you decide how much therapy you need and it’ll also make communicating with your therapist a lot easier.

If s/he is a speech case then…
See a therapist, because the reason for a speech problem determines what approach a therapist would use for your child. In general, there are 2 types of speech disorders -  Organic or Functional. 

Functional speech disorders have no main causes, however, the speech errors follow certain rules and patterns which a therapist can catch on to and use for therapy. Organic on the other hand is all about sensorimotor, structural, or perceptual problems causing speech errors. For full details read this article: https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/...

What language level is your child?
It’s important to know where your child’s language level stands. Because it directly affects what you should teach. Let’s say that your child can speak in sentences but only says it when s/he needs something from you. Your primary goal is to create more activities that your child can enjoy with you so there will be more opportunities to practice his/her language.

Non-verbal
If your child is non-verbal at 5 years old, there can be many reasons why this is the case. Usually, it is a mixture of speech AND language disorders. You should continue to tempt and entice your child to communicate with you. Whilst the way of communicating might not be using speech, it can be sign language, PECS (picture exchange communication systems), or even AAC (augmentative alternative communication). 

Also, you would need your child under instructional command to imitate speech in order to diagnose his/her speech ability. If your child doesn’t imitate you yet, that is the first thing you should be working on aside from teaching other ways to communicate with you. 

Check out our 3 step process to teach non-verbal children to start talking here: https://www.agentsofspeech.com/non-ve...

Single-word level
At this stage, you should be expanding your child’s vocabulary as much as possible. Children start to combine words when they reach a certain number of words in their vocabulary bank. We need words from different word classes e.g. verb, adjectives, and prepositions to form sentences. 

For more details watch our 30-minute word-combining class here for free: https://www.agentsofspeech.com/combin...

2-3 word level
This is where your child is using simple sentences to describe things that s/he sees. At speech therapy, we usually would concentrate on teaching longer sentences and answering questions such as “who” and “where”. So that they know how to flexibly change words inside of a phrase or sentence. 

Verbal Reasoning
When children start to speak in full sentences, the next step is to get them to use their language to explain something to us. This is where we start to ask simple “why” questions and describe things in a sequence. It might be teaching you how to play with a simple toy, answering why something happened.

Story Telling
Most speech therapy in the 5-6 year range is all about storytelling. Why? Because it works on a lot of things. You can introduce new words in a story with the correct context, it’s academically appropriate to learn with stories, and most importantly of all, it teaches a child to express something from start to finish with the guidance of pictures. There are also important skills to be learned such as being able to describe the appropriate amount of information (time, place, characters involved, motivation, problems, and solutions). These skills can then be generalized towards other facets of your child’s academics or speech coherence (ability to explain something).

Social training
Maybe your child is on the autism spectrum and his/her language isn’t bad at all, just that s/he cannot say the appropriate things at the appropriate time. Then your child should get therapy for social interactions. It might start off as 1-on-1 and later go towards a group setting to help your child generalize the new social rules taught to him/her. It’s important to know that you should ask for outside help because there’s only so much you can do at home with your child. S/he will need other people to generalize.