What's the speech chick going to do to/with my girl when she comes to evaluate her next week? She's coming to our house to observe the child in her natural habitat (that makes her sound like the screaming banshee she is, lol!)

No experience, Lesley, but I just wanted to say good luck. That's great that she is coming to your house. One less trip to the doctor's office is always nice!

I am not sure what she will do with Catherine but with Hobbes, they watched him play and the sounds that he made or didn't make. They also asked him questions to see if he could understand what they were asking. Then they talked to DH and I about the number of words that he could say or understand and what our concerns were.

This probably has not answered your question. I hope it goes well! Please keep us updated!

I don't know what she'll do either. Evan was never really evaluated, except when the whole team watched him playing at the children's rehab. centre and took notes from what I said about his delays. They just knew that he needed the various therapies and dove in when his name came up. Good luck with the evaluation!

I have no idea.. but just wanted to say GOOD LUCK! And let us know what DOES happen!! ;-)

I would say it will be pretty similar to Shannons experience, she may also "play" with her, they have ways to encourage speech, they will look out for things like if they are trying to talk, or whether it is babble. Out ST is really good, when Cooper went I thought there is no way he will talk to this woman, but she is really good at getting him to talk, he loves going there every week now.

We have had screening done for all three boys at First Words clinics and one private SLP came to our house for Iain. In all cases it was the same procedure.

The SLP arrives and greets the child and usually observes whilst handing you a bunch of paperwork to fill out like the Communicative Development Screening I made as a sticky here on this forum:

http://www.infantrefluxdisease.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7697

And then we did the Mac Arthur Inventory of Words too. It takes a bit to do these two so I had to hand them back in later, not that night.

She will observe Catherine and then likely try to engage her in play. Our SLP brought some cool toys and captured Iain's attention right away because they were different. He really did not engage with her but she listened so very well and made notes as to the "words" and letter sounds, etc. that he made. We had a discussion about pregnancy, development concerns, overall health concerns, frustration, etc. Then we got our game plan going for how often to meet.

Our SLP always left us a sheet of things to "work on" and as our SLP was also good with children who have swallowing difficulties (which Iain did back then) it was sometimes a fairly extensive list to do but doable nontheless. We were always left with something positive and with each session I felt we were getting somewhere.

Let us know how it goes.

One more thing... if Catherine and the SLP do not hit it off get another SLP. Walker is the most easy going child really and has worked well with every single last person he has had (and there have been a lot of them over the years) but when he met up with one he did not "click" with we had absolutely NO progress and he closed down. He was about 4 at the time but still it was clearly not condusive to a good working relationship so we changed to another SLP. She is a good one, but just not for Walker.

We have been through quite a few speech evaluations with my four-year-old (Jessie). She was about 22 months old when we started the evaulations and she didn't have any words as she had lost her speech at 18 months. The therapists would play with Jessie and try to engage her which was usually difficult due to autism that was still undiagnosed at the time. The therapists would also just watch Jessie to see how she interacted with us and communicated with us (pointing for something, screaming for something, etc.) Our evaulations were mainly parent interviews and us filling out lots of questionaires. When we had her speech evaluation with the school district at three-years-old, the therapist did more talking with her, tried to get her to answer questions, make sounds, etc. and testing of their own. I didn't do any speech questionairs with them, but did do lots of autism ones because that is what they suspected.

When we did James' speech evaluation in February it was mainly parent interview because he was only making a few sounds at the time.

With both kids, sign language has been the first step. It gave Jessie a way to communicate without speaking and it helped decrease her tantrums and frustration. James has already learned "more" and "all done" and it really does help that he can tell me what he wants.

Hope the evaluation goes well. Keep us posted.

Good Luck Lesley!

I hope it all goes well...update after!