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From: Ken Logan
Date: 17 Oct 2010
Time: 21:38:24 -0500
Remote Name: 98.70.58.69
I'll chime in here, since it looks like your post has not received a response yet. Another person in this discussion asked me if book-based activities would be useful for preschoolers. We've not used it that way to date, and here's why: (1) younger children often have a less well developed sense of the their speech behaviors and their feelings about those speech behaviors than older children -- so I don't now how realistic it would be to expect preschoolers to self-analyze their feelings in any detailed way, etc.; (2) many young children do not appear to be particularly frustrated by their disfluent speech, so in such cases I don't think you'd want to create a treatment goal that targets, for example "stuttering-related frustration." Preschoolers are sometimes acutely aware of and embarrassed by their fluency difficulties. In such cases, the first thing I'd probably do is to acknowledge/label their experience ("that word sounded a little bumpy") and then perhaps validate whatever feelings they seem to have about it ("sometimes we feel (mad, frustrated) when we get stuck"), and then re-assure/encourage ("that's okay...sometimes this happens when kids are learning to talk") Again, I'd only do the preceding things on occasion, and if a child was explicitly showing signs of frustration.