At The Speechie Spot, you can access supportive, experienced and precisely targeted intervention to help teens with:
- language/literacy concerns
- stuttering
- becoming a confident and effective communicator
Language:
How often does your teen’s mumbled “Dunno” actually mean “I’m not sure how to say what I am thinking, and I’m not going to embarrass myself by stumbling to get it out”? Language assessment and support by an experienced speech therapist can help your teen to become more confident in their communication skills.
Listening skills:
- Does your teen complain of being exhausted at the end of the school day?
- Do they seem to miss vital information?
- Do they seem especially unmotivated to converse?
- Do they seem to get confused and/or retreat into themselves when there are many things going on?
Contact Kerry at The Speechie Spot to find out more or to have an assessment.
Kerry is a qualified provider of The Listening Program®, and it’s branch program, inTime.
inTime for Teens:
Rhythm is with us all the time, but our sense of rhythm does not always work actively or effectively. Sometimes we need to teach our body to find its rhythm. When we can’t find our rhythm, our body is not connected optimally to our brain which, in turn, affects how our body functions physiologically, psychologically and socially. Sensory integration, communicative competence and social well-being can be affected by being in-synch or out-of-synch with ourselves and the rhythms that surround us.
Is your teen an ‘in-synch’ or an ‘out-of-synch’ individual?
• Does your teenager have a strong sense of time? good time management?
• Are your teen’s movements coordinated and spatially accurate?
• Does your teen have difficulty establishing and maintaining a routine?
• Can your teenager establish and maintain the pace of an activity?
• Does your teenager speak with fluency? expression?
• Is your teen prone to getting into ‘ruts’?
• Does your teenager seem to not ‘fit in’?
When our rhythm is ‘out-of-synch’, we find awareness and focus harder to maintain, and our timing ‘goes off’. We find it harder to get into the flow of activities or conversations and we are more likely to get stressed when we have a lot happening. Complex environments become much more difficult to navigate.
The inTime program provides a personalised program of listening training to entrain our innate sense of rhythm. It is based on a progression through rhythms that are derived from a multitude of cultures and over a hundred different instruments and blended into unique compositions by Nacho Arimany. Movement activities that use body, drum and voice are used to help you find and strengthen your own rhythm and to blend your rhythm effectively with the rhythms of daily life that are around you.
Literacy difficulties:
For the high school/tertiary student, there’s always information to read, process, then write about. This is hard to do if your language or literacy skills are fragile or too basic. An assessment of the skills underlying language and literacy development allows a speech pathologist to target therapy to address any fundamental gaps in knowledge.
Stuttering:
Stuttering and cluttering refer to when the words don’t come out of the mouth easily, or when they come out jumbled or too quickly. Therapy techniques available at The Speechie Spot can help solve problems of both stuttering and cluttering.
The Camperdown Program is an evidence based stuttering course recommended for adults and teens over 12 years and is suitable for the full spectrum of stutter severity. This program aims to reduce the client’s stuttering during everyday speech. Developed as a variant of the Lidcombe Program, the Camperdown Program uses slow and exaggerated spoken speech as its central control mechanism. Social Anxiety management can also be incorporated into the course.