Speech Iep

[Guest]

Hi,

 

I have a couple of children who I am referring to speech therapy because their speech is very poor.

 

I am pretty experienced with SEN but unsure what to put on their IEPs. It was the same with another girl last year. They have no resulting behaviour or learning difficulties they just need support from a group where they learn to articulate and get exercises to practise. Last year the gap between referring the child and them actually attending the group was 6 months and I never recieved any ideas of a programme of activities to carry out in pre-school.

If I have referred them then surely they are on Early years action so need an IEP but I am not a speech therapist so what can I put for their targets?

[Panders]

Hmm, in my area, if I put forward a child for speech and language therapy, then eventually they go to a clinic with parents and we get a report from that, a carbon copy if you like of what the parent has been given, that is how we set their targets. also the therapist pops into see the children on her books once every 6 months or so.

[Guest]

Hi Panders,

 

So what do you put on an IEP in the meantime whilst waiting for a report to come through (which usually comes after the child has been attending a group therefore is 'old news')?

[Guest]

I think you would have to specifically look at what they need help with. Is it pronunciation? If so what sounds do they struggle with? Work on one sound at a time with activities to help them devleop the tongue movements for this sound.

 

If it is more understanding or useage of language then look at what they are struggling with in regards to this. Are they using me instead of I, mixing up he and she, having general difficulty in forming longer sentences etc?

 

Once you had pinpointed the difficulty and broken it down into small chunks it will be easier to set a target and I'm sure people here would have loads of ideas for helping with specific difficulties.

 

The important thing is to not feel you have to tackle the whole thing at once. Pick one small target and work on that, then pick another when that is achieved.

[Panders]

Hi Panders,

 

So what do you put on an IEP in the meantime whilst waiting for a report to come through (which usually comes after the child has been attending a group therefore is 'old news')?

 

If I am confident enough without "diagnosis" from Speech Therapist I would be putting the kinds of things we had done for previous children with similar problems with speech, generally copy+one, keeping everything as simple as can be, teaching some Makaton.

 

I suppose it could be considered to be old news, but in the report it outlines exercises that have been given to the parents to do with the child - one last year was obviously teaching Makaton signs until real progress was being made with his speech, which was pretty well non-existent. So we just set a target of him knowing a certain amount of key signs for use at pre-school which would be helpful to him and to us, then set up a review with parent and wrote another one. (He's doing brilliantly now, saying quite short sentences, but his play has really taken off with the other children as you can imagine) I don't have his IEP here so can't really remember much about the early days!

 

Another child's recommendations was to encourage eye contact, WAIT to respond to him by being quiet until he looks up at you, bring objects towards your eyes remind him to look at you when he is talking/listening. We we used this to set a target for him with his concentration during games we played. We were also advised to do copy + one (say back a word to him and add another) so really on his IEP his target was to begin to use more words and after a period of time he was using 4+ words in sentences and his vocab grew.