Speech Therapy Progress
Speech therapy progress can be exciting and something to be celebrated, but conveying the amazing news can get lost in translation!
It may excite speech therapists that a child can categorize objects with 80% accuracy according to function and group without a visual or verbal cue. However, this doesn’t always make sense to non-professionals in the field. Why would it?
Solutions
To help solve this problem (I’m just getting started here), I created concise checklists that track major goal areas for children 0-5 years of age. These include:
- Intelligibility
- Speech
- Phonology
- Morphology
- MLU
- Vocabulary
- Sentence Structure
- Concepts
- Pronouns
- Listening
- Pragmatics
- Asking Questions
- Answering Questions
- Literacy
Currently, most websites and handouts cover one area of development. I couldn't find one that included all the areas of development listed above and that was CONCISE. No parent, caregiver, or teachers want a packet of 15 pages. That is just overwhelming and confusing. That is why I condensed all these areas down to one page for a 12 month developmental period.
Uses
I LOVE these checklists. I use them initially to:
- to explain the results of an evaluation
- to share my reasoning behind the goals I created.
As a child progresses, I pull the original checklists out to:
- demonstrate progress
- explain why new goals are or are not created!
When a child is dismissed from therapy, sometimes parents worry that he/she may fall behind. I provide these families with these checklists to help track progress at home and to call if there are any further concerns.
Disclaimer
These checklists are NOT NORMED. This means, they SHOULD NOT be used to qualify a child for speech therapy or to dismiss a child from a program.
Also, the milestones aren’t “perfect.” Some milestones may be off by a few months here or there. I estimated developmental ranges in order to keep the checklists concise and fit within the same 12-month range.
This was the most important thing for me! I wanted information that was easily digested by a non-professional in the field.
Buy Speech Therapy Progress Charts
If you are a parent or a professional who is interested in buying these charts, we have them for sale for only $5.
Please click the link below to read more about them!
Speech-language Milestone Charts Please!
Research Behind Speech Therapy Progress Handouts
To make these checklists, I used the following resources:
- American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (n.d.). How does your child hear and talk? from http://www.asha.org/ public/speech/development/chart.html
- American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (n.d.). Your child’s communication: Kindergarten. from http://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/kindergarten.htmlBowen, C. (1998).
- Brown’s stages: The development of morphology and syntax.Lanza, J., & Flahive, L. (2008).
- Guide to communication milestones. East Moline, ILMcLeod, S. & Crowe, K. (2018).
- Children’s consonant acquisition in 27 languages: A cross-linguistic review. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. doi:10.1044/2018_AJSLP-17-0100. Available from:https://ajslp.pubs.asha.org/article.aspx?articleid=2701897