Proverbs 31

I want to focus on the need for speech evaluation.  When I say speech I mean how your child says their words or in some cases don’t say their words.  My daughter didn’t talk, we didn’t know why but she didn’t.  Step 1 Check your child’s hearing.  We just had her being evaluated by our normal doctor and nothing seemed wrong so we moved on.  Step 2 Check your child’s understanding.  Does your child follow simple commands, try to communicate or get angry if they can’t?  Can they play, hum, listen to a story, use facial expressions?  If they seem to understand move on to speech.  Step 3 Get an evaluation.  This is helpful to you as a parent, being homeschoolers we know our children best and can help them best.  Often with speech problems we feel inadequate and that we need a "trained specialist."  These are great tools but we parents are the best for helping our children.

Begin a notebook about your child’s speech and record for a week what they say, how they communicate and and what they can’t say.  At the end of the week find your child’s strengths and weaknesses.  And see if there are any patterns in their speech.  If you don’t see any do another week, to compare.  My daughter had none.  I am blessed to have a speech and language pathologist as my mother so she did a full evaluation on my daughter.  You may not have this but you can find someone.  Look first in your church family to see if there is one who can help you, if not try area churches to try to find help before trying to pay for an evaluation.  The problem with paying for an eval.  is your child may not perform that day and it is not cheap.  Yes, public schools can help, but consider carefully the involvement if you decide on this.

The evaluation if a crucial first step to helping your child, it lets you know where they are and where to start.  The process of helping your child through a speech difficulty is long and hard, but the earlier you begin the easier it will be.