after school speech part 44 and 45

Last Tuesday and today, SJ had speech sessions.  Sorry I didn't post this sooner, but sometimes life gets in the way.  SJ's therapist told me that he has been having some trouble annunciating /th/.  When he says /th/, it sometimes sounds like a /f/.  During their session, she noticed that incorrect sound when he said three, math, third and Beth.  They sounded more like free, maf, fird and Bef.  She told me to listen for this at home and see if we hear it.  Maybe I am so used to his speech pattern, because I didn't hear him say /f/ for /th/ all week.

I did go over some of the /th/ sentences with SJ for his homework.  In the ten sentences that I had him read, he correctly pronounced the /th/ each time.  He didn't always give me the correct inflection in his voice if it had an exclamation point or question mark, so that is something else for us to focus on.

She also worked on idioms with him. Things such as "butterflies in your stomach", "stay on your toes" and "on top of the world" were some of the examples she gave him.  He didn't really understand them, so we will have to work on these as well.  This is one area where he seems stereotypically PDD.  He is so literal!  When I asked him what on top of the world meant, he said "like an astronaut".  I told him that it meant a person was extremely happy.  We will keep working at them.

During today's session, she focused on grammar.  They were working on identifying problems and solutions.  She said he did okay with that, but occasionally he used a low growling voice when he talked to her.  She said she didn't think he was doing it intentionally, but she reminded him that the person he is talking to may think he is being rude to them.  He does do this at home too, so we will have to continue to remind him that it is not an appropriate way to talk to others.

The last thing she worked on was using past tense verbs in sentences.  For example:  the verb she gave him was fight.  Together they came up with "Yesterday, I fought my nemesis."  When she gave him the verb say, he told her "I don't know," said the guy.  She gave us a list of more verbs to do as homework.  She also assigned us a Problems/Solutions worksheet.