How Does Speech Therapy Help
Speech disorders are common among those with cerebral palsy. In fact, a 2012 study conducted by Swedish researchers found that speech problems affect more than half of all children with cerebral palsy.
Some children with cerebral palsy have difficulty controlling the muscles in their face, throat, neck and head. This can lead to troubles with speech, chewing and swallowing. It can also cause drooling and affect overall ability to interact and learn. Those who also have difficulty hearing may have a hard time understanding spoken language.
Speech and language therapy seek to improve a childs speech and communication by strengthening the muscles used for speech, increasing oral motor skills and by improving their understanding of speech and language. It also can help with swallowing disorders, like dysphagia.
How To Practice Light Articulatory Contact Exercise
You can learn light contacts at home from the video.
Your speech therapist will help you practice light articulatory contact on all consonants. You will learn how to implement it on single-syllable words/sounds. Gradually, you will learn to apply the technique on initial, medial, and final positions.
For example â you will learn how to establish light articulatory contact on the consonant /p/ in pink, poppy, and top.
Soon, you will graduate to phrase level, sentence level, and conversational level applications of light articulatory contact.
Once you learn this technique from your therapist, you can always practice it at home alone or with family.
Math In Everyday Life: Shopping Spree
We originally called this activity Weekly Ads.but that didnt sound as fun as a shopping spree! Come up with cognitive speech therapy activities for adults around planning and creating a shopping list.
To keep this activity functional, find advertisements for products that fit your patients interest. For example, if they love gardening, use a garden centers weekly ad to plan next springs garden. Or if its around the holidays and they have young grandchildren they adore, pick up a big-box store or toy store catalog to create a gift list.
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Moving Your Tongue From Side
Before you move on to more advanced tongue strengthening exercises, youll want to ensure that you can do some basic movements with your tongue.
Here, you will open your mouth and touch the right side of your mouth with your tongue. Hold it for a few seconds, reach the left side of your mouth, and then repeat the exercise.
What Are Speech Therapy Exercises
Informal, personal interactions marked by focused speech language exercises are at the heart of speech-language therapy. Structured speech therapy exercises are techniques and tools that encourage a childs speech and language development. Theyre a necessary part of improving a childs speech, language, and communication skills and, when delivered as part of an engaging activity, are fun for young patients while still being a very effective part of therapy.
In fact, if you really want to connect with your pediatric clients, fun activities should be an essential part of every speech therapy session. Creativity should play a big role in your SLP practice. That means always having a new exercise or game in your SLP toolbox. Switching it up keeps your kids and you, too, quite frankly interested and engaged. Its a win-win. A positive speech therapy session means working toward clearly defined SLP goals and having a good time, too. What could be better than that?
Keep things fresh in your practice by implementing new pediatric speech therapy exercises and youll soon find youre having as much fun as they are.
Weve curated a list of our favorite games aimed at language, voice exercises, speech therapy and more that are sure to get your preschool and school-aged clients engaged, excited, and looking forward to their next SLP session!
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How Body Movements Are Affected By A Stroke
Strokes can affect your ability to coordinate body movements. This can be very mild, such as shakiness while writing, or severe, like having trouble walking.
Learning how to do things that use fine motor skills, like threading a needle, can be frustrating for stroke patients, but try not to get frustrated if you can’t get it at first. It may take you several attempts or a lot of practice before you’re able to thread the needle smoothly.
More significant movements like walking or reaching for an object may also become impaired following a stroke. Often physical and occupational therapy is needed to improve these fine and gross motor skills.
Calendar Tasks: Reading A Calendar
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Effort Closure Techniques: Hypoadduction
Use effort closure techniques with patients with hypoadduction of the vocal folds. These techniques aim to increase the force of vocal fold adduction.
- Clasp hands together then squeeze the palms together as hard as possible
- If seated on a chair, pull upward or push downward with both hands
- Interlace hands and pull outward
Best Stroke Recovery Speech Therapy Exercises
Stroke is a condition that impacts the blood flow to your brain, and it may cause you to experience symptoms such as slurred speech or difficulty moving one side of your body.
Stroke can have many effects on your body depending on which parts of your brain are affected. It can cause you to experience weakness or paralysis in parts of your body, an inability to speak properly, difficulty swallowing, or seeing.
In this article, we will discuss:
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Speech Therapy Exercise Apps
While the exercises above are a great place to start, theyarent tailored to your unique problem areas.
To get even better results, its a great idea to try usingspeech therapy apps like CT Speech and CognitiveTherapy App. It assesses your problem areas and assigns exercises tomeet your needs.
Best of all, the CT App contains hundreds of exercises sothat you can get quality therapy without the need of a therapist. In fact, theapp was designed by Speech-Language Pathologist to provide better therapy fortheir patients at home.
While its always best to work with a therapist, manytherapists encourage patients to use the CT App at home between sessions.
Tongue Tip Touching Exercise
The patient is asked to touch different parts of the mouth using the tip of the tongue, a mirror is used so that the patient could see if he is making any mistake and could correct it.
Step 1: At the very beginning, the person is asked to touch his front teeth using tip of the tongue and view it in the mirror
Step 2: Second is to touch the back of the teeth using the tip of the tongue. Use the mirror to have a visual input of the movements.
Step 3: Third step is to touch the upper arch of the mouth using the tip of the tongue. It may be a bit uncomfortable but will get better with practice.
Step 4: Lastly, take the tip of the tongue as back as possible in your mouth. The back part of the mouth has soft palate which may cause tingling when touched with the tongue which is normal.
Make sure to repeat these speech therapy exercises as many times as is possible in a day.
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Speech Therapy By Age
As the child gets older or improves their abilities, their speech therapy treatment plan must change accordingly. The first three years of a childs life are extremely important for acquiring speech and language skills because their brain is developing and maturing, allowing it to easily absorb this information. Early intervention gives a child their best chance to develop and learn at their full potential.
- Toddlers Speech therapy for toddlers is play-based with games and toys, the repetition of noises and words, singing songs and arts and crafts.
- Young children For school-aged children, theres an extra emphasis on social interaction, although games and toys are still used. Therapy usually consists of different activities to promote communication, like storytelling, having conversations, repetition of sounds and words and working on the childs school work. Therapy also helps the child improve their social skills, such as keeping their head up and maintaining eye contact while talking.
How To Practice Speak While Exhaling To Stop Stuttering At Home
You can master this technique all on your own. First, inhale with your nose and begin speaking as you start exhaling.
When you exhale, your vocal folds are more relaxed. They cannot come together to hold the air back. It reduces the laryngeal muscular tension.
The working principle of this method is quite simple, and you can keep practicing this at home whenever you speak to your family members or friends.
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Understand Words And Paragraphs
Aphasia patients can have difficulty understanding words. It can help to do one of these speech exercises:
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Place several objects in front of the person with aphasia. Say the name of one of the objects and see if the aphasia patient can identify the correct object amongst the choices.
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Read a short story to the person with aphasia and ask them simple questions related to the story.
Help With Pronunciation And Accent Modification
Accents are a natural part of language. While every person has an accent, sometimes people want to change the way they speak and pronounce words because of difficulties being understood. This can lead to trouble at work, school, or in that persons social life. Accent modification speech therapy can help by teaching you methods to change your sound and intonation in order to meet your speech goals.
People who seek accent modification are often:
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People who speak English as a second language
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People who want to communicate more effectively at work
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Acquired Apraxia Of Speech
Treatment may include exercises to improve motor skills, oral-motor exercises, and strategies for increasing vocabulary or sentence length. A speech-language pathologist will work with the client and family on implementing procedures for home practice that can help promote speech changes.
The goal of intervention is to reduce or correct apraxia symptoms and increase functional communication skills in everyday communication situations.
What Is Speech Therapy
Speech therapy is treatment that helps improve your speech and language skills. It helps with early language skills, voice and sound production, comprehension, fluency, clarity and expression.
What does a speech therapist do?
A speech therapist also called a speech-language pathologist assesses, diagnoses and treats speech disorders and communication problems. They treat children with developmental delays, as well as adults with speech impairments caused by injury or illness. Your healthcare provider may refer you to a speech-language pathologist for a variety of reasons.
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Speech Therapy After Stroke Or Traumatic Brain Injury
Our brains have neuroplasticity, Lough says. This means our brain can rewire itself. So, if you have damage to one area, you can use healthy areas of the brain to take over the damaged area.
This is how we build new neural connections, which is what speech therapy exercises help patients do after a stroke.
For example, a stroke or other traumatic brain injury can cause aphasia. A person may have trouble finding words, forming sentences, or understanding conversation or what theyre reading.
Lough says that she might do exercises that teach word finding strategies or sentence formulation strategies. We might just work to find strategies to make the stronger areas of the brain take over, she says.
If the stroke has caused dysarthria, the exercises are different. In this case, Lough would work to strengthen their voice or their breath support for their voice, and she may work on stress patterns in sentences or inflection to make speech sound more natural. Often with dysarthria, we do exercises to strengthen the tongue, lips, and jaw, as well as exercises to practice overemphasizing their words so that they can say their words more clearly. Well also do exercises that involve slowing their rate of speech, which allows their mouth more time to clearly produce their words, she says.
SLPs may recommend speech therapy exercises at home, but they tailor those exercises to each patient. Its all about helping people build on their strengths, she says.
Building Up Breath Control
Print out reading material then add slash marks between words to denote a new breath group. Where you put the slash marks will depend on each patients skill level.
Patient Instructions:
Use your breath support strategies while saying the following. You may take breaths as needed.
For more respiration exercises and materials, visit our shop
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Types Of Aphasia In Stroke Patients
Different forms of aphasia mean that the patient has different difficulties concerning speech and language.
Brocas aphasia refers to difficulty getting out the right words or sentences longer than 4 words. Formation of words can be difficult, and the speech probably sounds slurred or garbled.
Wernickes aphasia patients can get the words out, but they have a hard time discerning the meaning of words. Theyll often say words in sentences that are irrelevant or that dont make sense.
There are many other aphasia classifications. The general idea with aphasia is that patients have difficulty forming words, saying words properly, and forming complete and grammatical sentences.
If your loved one isnt making continual progress, or if they dont feel comfortable practicing independently, its important to seek the support of a licensed speech pathologist.
Speech pathologists are trained professionals who can help your loved one communicate with confidence. The first step to connecting to one of our specialized virtual speech therapists is to book a free introductory phone call
Speech therapy can help with speech improvement after a stroke. These are 5 home exercises for stroke patients that can help.
Note Your Daily Accomplishments
Keep a journal. You should note the smallest of the small positive changes you observe in your speech.
For example, you answered the door with a smile and a âHiâ without stuttering. Or, you went to the grocers and initiated a conversation.
You can also include stories of how you came in touch with other PWS who have motivated you. Share your stories in forums and communities.
Keep a digital journal to include photos, videos, and screen-grabs. Make your journey towards fluency memorable and inspiring.
It will help you focus on the positives of stuttering rather than let you dwell on the drawbacks.
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Cognitive Speech Therapy Goals For Adults
The ability to communicate is treasured at all ages. Babies begin to babble and use physical cues to demonstrate their needs. As people grow, there are changes and new opportunities for communication. In your golden years, communication becomes a vital tool in remaining healthy and safe.
The overall goal of speech therapy for older adults is to increase cognitive skills, teach safe swallowing and improve functional communication, all as a means to providing the patient with the best quality of life possible. The actual, specific cognitive speech therapy goals for adults will vary between individuals and depend largely on what the root cause is of the persons need for therapy. Here are some common causes of a need for speech therapy rehabilitation and what the goals may include:
Dysphagia
The lack of ability to swallow defines this condition and can occur for a variety of reasons. Older adults cannot afford to lose nutrition due to an inability to swallow, so this is a serious concern. To help combat this condition, speech therapists may set goals such as improving eating positions, using modified utensils and avoiding certain foods.
Aphasia
After a loved one has a stroke, there are many concerns. Aphasia is a communication disorder where patients have difficulty finding the right word or may use altered or halting speech. In this case, the goal of speech therapy is to achieve maximum possible functioning.
Dementia
Next Steps: See Your Dentist Or Physician
If you suspect that you or your child habitually breathes through the mouth, you should discuss the issue with your doctor and, ideally, your dentist as well.
Sometimes people underestimate the importance of seeking care for this condition. In children, it can lead to developmental problems. In adults, mild habitual mouth breathing may still contribute to oral health issues, but more extreme cases might cause sleep apnea and other serious health issues.
Keep your dentist informed of these and any other health concerns. Breathing through the mouth can impact oral health, so even if your physician is satisfied, your dentist may notice signs of dry mouth or other dental health concerns.
Depending on the exact issue, your doctor or dentist may refer you to another specialist such as an orthodontist, physical therapist, sleep specialist, or myofunctional therapist for myofunctional therapy exercises.
Southview Dentistrys own Dr. Kelly Wilson is a trained myofunctional therapist who can help you or your child learn techniques to breathe properly through the nose.
If you live in the Charlotte area and need a dentist to consult, reach out to Southview Dentistry. We have proudly helped patients achieve and maintain healthy smiles since 2009.
We love helping our patients live healthy lives, so we strive to keep up with evidence-based treatment options and best practices in dentistry. Contact us to schedule your appointments.
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