I am so fortunate to have a profession I love. As a speech-language pathologist (SLP), I provide services in areas not often heard of before. Most people furrow their brow as I list my skills and interests—speech, language, swallowing/feeding disorders, post-stroke treatment, cognitive-communication skills, social-emotional skills, autism, voice disorders, fluency disorders—and the list goes on.
Parenting Resources
Babble to Books: Reading with Your Very Young Child
The value of reading to infants and toddlers has been well documented by recent research studies. Reading aloud with young children, talking about the pictures on a page or even paraphrasing words expands children’s imaginations and encourages language development. Reading aloud allows infants and young children to hear the sounds of our language combined in words and sentences.
Create a Reading Habit
Bedtime stories are a long-standing family tradition in my family. Growing up I was read to every night before bed, a chapter here, a story there, and now do the same for my two boys who are three and five. Each night after brushing their teeth, my boys pick a couple of books off the bookshelf and the three of us hunker down in one of the big beanbag chairs we have sitting on the floor.
Book Magic
The “not learning to read thing” kind of creeps up on you slowly. For my son and me, it was like this:
We loved to read together. Well, actually, I read to him, and he loved his books.
Our shelves were overflowing with books. “Will you read to me?” I would ask him. “No, I like it when you read to me,” he would answer. “That’s ok,” I would think. Then I would tell him, “I’ll read to you. I like to read to you and soon you will be in Kindergarten and you will be reading on your own.”
Knowledge is Power- Evaluations at the Stern Center
Doubt creeps in at an early age… perhaps it starts in kindergarten, when some children are able to read with ease while for others it feels like running in sand. Maybe it is in second grade, when a child can spell a word one day, but that word is a stranger the next.
Preparing Your Child for an Evaluation
You have made the decision to have your child evaluated. Maybe your child has a learning style difference, which includes being a gifted learner; maybe a learning disability is suspected; perhaps your child has attention difficulties; concerns around adaptive behavioral problems, including autism, may be the issue, or maybe your child is struggling with a neurological handicapping condition.
