What is early intervention (EI) ?
Early intervention is for children ages birth to 3 years and their families. As early intervention speech therapists, we give your family communication tools and strategies to help facilitate speech and language development in naturalistic settings such as your home environment. Therapy is aimed to include typical day to day routines such as getting dressed, picking up toys, setting up play structures and engaging in play routines, eating a snack or any other meaningful and functional opportunities.
Language Strategies
Modeling strategies in naturally occurring environments is essential as this helps promote your ability to support your child's participation in family and community activities. A book reading activity for example, is one of many ways you can help facilitate communication opportunities. We can work together to increase your child’s receptive language skills for examples by targeting pointing to objects/actions/colors/animals while reading together.
We may also want to target expressive language by having the child imitate our vocal approximations or whole word/phrase models while pointing to objects/actions/colors/animals. Waiting to turn a page is one effective communication strategy to contrive an opportunity for the child to make a request.
Depending on the child’s present skill levels, we may aim to combine simple one-word responses to expand your child’s mean length of utterance to 2 or 3 word sentences while also increasing his or her vocabulary.
If you would like to know more about how Speech360 could become an early intervention speech provider for your baby, please contact us for a free phone consultation to find out the details.