4 Stages to Language Therapy | www.agentsofspeech.com/micro

Hey. Hello, this is Ming from agentsofspeech.com today we're going to talk about the stages that nearly all children who come our way, they go through this during language therapy. And why we don't call it like speech therapy, and I'm calling it language therapy is so that you don't get confused. Because what we're talking about here is purely about the language development. Okay? And if you are a member of our not member, like student, I guess, of the micro course that you've gone through, that you know, that $9 or $10 USD micro course and you know, and you've gone through all of it, then you probably would have gotten an email from me telling you about the stages, the four stages of language therapy, basically. And I'm going to go through it here also in public just to get everyone on the same page. And the reason for this is because recently, as you know, from the last live, if you watched it, then you will know that I am trying to create an online membership for parents like yourself to learn together and also to help you along the way through the. Through the through, throughout the whole journey. Like, so there are four stages that I want to like share with you as much as I can and I will teach as much as I know there. And the biggest benefit of this membership is basically to upload videos to me and I can give you a, I will give you a feedback according to the video you submitted to me and it's all private. You don't need to be scared about anything. If you don't want to, then you don't need to upload anything, right? But if you do want to, then you, you know, you upload it to me and then I'll show it to you on like a private zoom call with a bunch of people. And then whether you want that the recordings to be sent privately to each other and cut it up and stuff, or you know, I could process it and make it blurry your faces and post as a recording. That's like up to you because we're building the membership together. We're doing together. So today we're going to talk about the four stages that I want to help you with. The first stage is obviously from like first words, right? Like from zero to like something to having word sounds and like meaningful speech at least. And a lot of parents will say, oh my kid can speak about A to Z, about like count from 0 to like 10 or 20 or even 100 sometimes. But the thing is, is it meaningful, right? Does it have a Communicative value in it. That's the problem. And. And from zero to, like, first words, what we're talking about is basically how. How communicative, how specific are the words? You know, can they use a certain word to say a specific thing? Not everything is like, mama. Whatever is. Is like, like, I want, I want, I want. That's not very communicative. That's just using the stuff they know to tell you what, like, they want something doesn't mean that they can, like, really talk to you. Right. So that's the first stage. And don't worry, I'm going to share my screen later to let you take a look. And the second one is basically, I'm just sharing now, actually. Wait a minute. Open it. Right. Give me a moment. Okay. There we go. All right. Hopefully you can see it. If you can see it, let me know. Right. And also tell me where you're watching this from. I think it's kind of fun because, you know, we were talking to parents from, like, just now. I was talking to a parent from Afghanistan. Right. Some parents mostly are from Southeast Asia. Some mo. And like, 30 of you guys are from USA. That's kind of cool. The first stage, if you can see my mouse, I know you guys are watching from a phone or something. Hopefully you can see it. So I'm just gonna, like, zoom in a little bit here, right. If I can. Nope, that's. I am not doing this. I am not doing it well here on camera anyways. So here. The first thing here is that first words you can imitate. Imitate sounds, use single words consistently and not just, like, say whatever sound they want. Right? That's the. That's the biggest difference about, you know, children who are, like, using words for their own entertainment versus, like, really communicating with you with their. With their words. Right. So what do you do after that? Because it's pretty easy to get there. Okay. I say pretty easy as in not their pronunciation, their articulation. Sometimes it takes a long time to get there. Right. So other than that. Ah, man, I'm gonna do it again. Sorry, man. Sorry, guys. So I'm gonna open with, like, something else, and I'll share my screen again. Sorry. There we go. This is better like that. Okay, so we can zoom in, make it a little bigger. All right, so the next step was, like, combining words. And why there's. The icon of this kid playing a toy is basically is because children, after, they use single words to, like, ask for stuff. Well, some therapists actually just mending. Right. If they Call it manding. Then they can use like single words or, or whatnot to tell you what they want. Right. But if they need to combine words, the. One of the prerequisites I really think a child would need is to have appropriate play skills. Okay. And to be able to play toys is very, very important in language development because children use toys to discover, like, and learn new words and put words towards meaningful context. And play is the most natural out of everything, basically. Right. Much better than a video. Right? And then what these children, what we want these children to do at this stage is to use like two to three word sentences to really, like, describe what they're doing, ask for things, comment on situations, answer questions like who and where. For instance, who's wearing the gray shirt? Obviously it's Ming, right? Who's wearing glasses? Obviously me. And well, where is the cat right now? The computer, although you can't see her, she's right here. So these are the type of questions we want them to be able to understand or at least try to say. So the next thing that we need to do is, oh, look, someone's from Nigeria. Nice. Welcome. Okay, so verbal reasoning is the third stage that we like to like that I think is important. Okay, so after that they can use like three word sentences and like, good grammar form. The next step for me would be try to teach the why question and also some how questions. We start from why. Why is it wet? Oh, because someone spilled water. Okay, so the simple whys. And then we work on towards like different types of whys. And there are quite a few. And I don't have the stuff on hand to demonstrate to you what kind are. But anyways, other than that, we want to teach some complex sentences. So some different complex sentences would be like what we call relative clauses, right? Which is like, oh, the man who is wearing glasses is talking on live right now. The man in the black. Oh my God, a man in black glasses is talking to the camera right now. So there are two sentences in one sentence. The man who is wearing something in one sentence is talking to the camera is another sentence. You put two sentences together. Okay, so that's what we call like a complex sentence. That's one of them. There's a few. All right. And then the last stage is where you, like, your child starts to tell stories. Okay, they tell stories and they're able to use like toys, they're able to use pictures, books to tell your story. And most importantly, this is the only step where I would try to introduce some past events. Most of the time. Like parents say, oh, my kid can't answer what happened at school. Yeah, well, I only will start to try and teach them and this stage because if you're talking about in different stages up here, we're still dealing with like here and now situations most of the time. Okay, what do I mean by here and now? Here and now means? I mean, if you've been to speech therapy, you must have, maybe you have heard of here and now. So children will only talk about, think about, you know, play with things that are right here, right now. Okay. Other than that, it's pretty difficult for them to grasp even if they remember, it's difficult for them to know because stuff like past tense and past tense build and to talk about something out of context is very difficult for them. So here are the four things again. Oopsies. Here are the four stages again. Don't worry, this will be uploaded to Facebook or Instagram very soon when I fix some of the formatting and change the words a little bit. So this is just for you guys to look at for now. And this is basically what we're trying to achieve. Okay, so someone asked. I'm just going to take some time to answer some questions. If you have any questions you want to say hi, you can also. So this person says, my boy can say about 10 words and prompted when prompted or being modeled doesn't mean he is not on stage one yet. So not really. Well, if they can imitate. Right. What I'm talking about here is that he is at stage one. He's trying to learn towards stage one. Right. You want him to be able to imitate, want him to be able to use words by himself and have an effective way to cue them and like to prompt them. What I'm getting here is when you prompt him, you need to say the word yourself, which is not that effective because what if you don't talk? You don't give sound and won't talk at all? Right. So he is at stage one. He just hasn't finished. Right, Right. So don't mind the type of language I use. Like stage one, stage two, stage three. It's just to give you more clarity about like, what to think, what to do at certain situations. Right. It's a generalization, but for the good of, for you to learn. Okay. And I say you, not the kid. Because most of the time learning to learning the ways of teaching a child is very. You need to put children to buckets like myself. Obviously. All children are different. Right? All children are, you know, they respond to different techniques. There's a lot of different things going on, right? But at the same time, if you do not generalize them and put them into buckets and think like, oh, this kid is like that, right? And if you have that, like, wisdom, then you can talk to people who have like, gone through similar things as you, right? If, let's say that you identified your kid as having, being in stage one, you can talk to other parents in stage one and have tips thrown at each other. You know, you'll understand more about that. And as you see, what works for one child doesn't, may not work for another, but if you tweak a little bit, it will kind of work, right? So I'm going to talk about more about this membership here because there's a lot of people who are asking, right? So if you ask me, there's actually more than 20 people now who have expressed interest. Oh my God, my cat nearly pressed the power button. Okay? So be careful. All right? So like, if you have said that, oh, you raised your hand and said, yeah, I want to join, that's great, thank you very much. And I want to address some issues and also ask for some feedback here, right? Because we're trying this, like, no one has ever done this before, as much as I know. All right? There are like other online courses for parents, right? There are other live streams like this one for our parents, although we are the most consistent ones. Right? But you know, like, what I'm trying to say is, like, there's no one who is making a membership where there's a way for parents to interact with each other and also to submit like, videos after knowing, like giving you some concrete, step by step tips on what to do at home, right? So, you know, right now if you're not inside the micro course, you should, because we're only opening to the micro course people first at a discounted rate and what we call like a founders rate, right? Because the founders rate is like, because this, this whole membership needs to be monthly, okay? Because I'm committed to review everything that you throw at me, right? And I'm also committed to give more and more lessons that are tailored to your questions. Because I've never done this at a large scale. I mean, I've, I've taught a lot of parents over the Internet, right? And I read and I watch a lot of videos of parents doing the work. So but then I, I, I don't know if all the stuff that I've learned from the parents, like from teaching them is that all that you need to know, right. So we need to keep on expanding, expanding, expanding, Right. And to give you the best, like lesson experience online. Right. And after that you can break into groups, into smaller groups, maybe on Facebook. I don't really like Facebook groups, to be honest. But you know, it is the most, you know, used thing and the most free, right. It's cheapest. So we're going to use that first for now. But later on as the membership grows bigger, like you have more and more people, moms especially, who have joined us, then we will probably migrate off of Facebook and have our own app that you can like watch stuff and it's more private. You can set a different name with a different display picture and stuff. And no one can download your, your videos and so on. So that's what I'm shooting for. Right? That's what I'm shooting for. So at any point, please ask me any questions about the, these four stages. One of the questions I get a lot is like, how long does like a stage require? Right? And my answer is, I don't know, man. Like, for instance, there's a kid who came to me like one on one, face to face. We were at like the, the zero to words phase for like a long, long time. We haven't even gone through it yet. And he's been like, he's got a genetic disorder. I'm not going to tell like more details than that. But he's been working on the same stuff for like a year. And suddenly he started to imitate sounds, right. Which is a huge breakthrough. Start playing with toys, you start using gestures. And we're working towards it. Okay, so within the whole thing to how to do like how to teach therapy at home, there are actually three pillars that go through for all stages. And I'm trying to make it as structured as I can and make it as generalized for everyone that is watching. Because a lot of you guys send me an email and say, oh, you always talk about children who haven't talked yet or hasn't talked yet. How about the children who are talking but not in sentences and so on. So I'm trying. And what I really want to do is to give you a framework. The three parts with ability to take notes that tell you how to write the, the goals for yourself and set it and like how to evaluate it, which is very hard, by the way. That's why I want you guys to be able to send me. What's that called? Send me a video to me. Send me a video and let Me see, like, what you're working on and how you're like, how's it going at home? Okay. That's very important. Okay. If you don't have enough feedback as a parent, then you become very lost. I'm sure a lot of you have tried it before, that someone told you, like, even me. I told you, just do that. And then you're like, what do you mean? And you will only know how it works when you try it and you get feedback from it. That's how I learned a lot of things. That's how your child learns a lot of things, too, because you demonstrate they do it and then you get feedback. No, that's not the. Whatever. That's not how you say the word. And then you. You prompt them and model again. Right. That's what I'm trying to do here. Just to give you guys a sneak peek. What I'm working on lately is this one. All right, so this is basically the beta version of our membership. So this will be like. You can see this is basically the same thing on mobile. So you can see, here's a dashboard later on, populate it, whatever. But I know that you cannot really see if you're watching from a phone. On the left here, if you can see my mouse moving, there's this button where it says, submit video for review. You click on. It goes to a Google form. Okay, so this Google form, you need to log on to Gmail. This is my Gmail. Don't email that, please. For business. Anyways, so you need to, like, you need to log on to Google because it's something that uploads to my Google Drive, which is like private and secured by the business account. Right. So you need a. So how you do it is basically like you write your name on. Zoom in. Right, Zoom in. So write your name here and it's Ming. And then your child's name maybe Steve. Like three. Three and a half, right? 3.5, something like that. And then you need to choose what stage your child is at. So for instance, if Steve here is starting to combine words. So I'm going to write combining words. And don't worry, inside the membership, we're going to have different parts here. Well, obviously this is still empty, right? We're still working on it, but. Oopsies. But basically, we're going to have videos and also questionnaires to help you define which stage your child at and what you should do after you choose what stage your child is at. What you need to do is to set up the goal so for instance, if you write something like, for instance, he's doing like combining words, right? So if he's learning how to like. So you see like type of therapy here and language level and materials. This type of therapy I haven't talked about yet. So let's say that structured task, there's only three. Okay. You'll get to know soon. Okay. Structured task, right. And then it's a verb. Object phrases with pictures. Right? That's how you would write to me. So you would basically put any particular problems, share questions and concern here. You might say, oh, he's leaving out the verb every time. Unless I prompt something like that. Okay. And then upload a video. So real quick, you can basically, it's just easy. It just goes in and then you can see some of the videos that parents have sent me, basically. But you can't really see anything, right? You can't see the faces, so it's too small anyway. So you can click one of these and then it opens and then you can upload. Right? I'm not going to click it, but it's just a real quick, short and fast thing for you to see that what we're trying to work up here and to answer your questions about like the pricing and stuff. Yes, it will be monthly because, you know, the scale of it. We actually do need the cash flow to help with the server. Right. So that's something we need to do together. Right. And then the other thing is, parents are also asking, when can I join? So if you can please mark it in your calendars right now as 22nd March will be starting to have admissions to it. So you can start admitting yourself. You can put your hand up, say, oh, I want to go. I want to try. And then we're going to close it off in April 1st, not April fools. Okay. We're going to close it off at April 1st. Yeah. And then after that, membership is going to be closed. Because I want to work with you as tightly as possible because this is what I do with like for my private clients anyways. So I want to close the doors and work with you to build the lessons inside to watch your videos as much as possible. Right. Upload as much as you want in the beginning. Right. Because we're trying to create a system here so that when the doors open again, when other parents are able to join, first of all, the price will go up. Right. Second of all, because you guys have helped me so much in creating the lessons, the, the infrastructure, like how to upload and evaluate yourselves and if, if we've gotten really good results, then we can share it to the world and we can create like a better system for, for, for, for parents who really need help. Okay. And that's what I'm trying to do because I cannot. It's basically like the whole group, the parents of speech delayed children support group is getting quite big. It's getting quite out of hand. I cannot like go through everything, but at the same time I want to help more. Right. It's just before I didn't want to do this because I think it was, I thought it was too much of a commitment for both of us. But now I feel like, you know, if we don't try, then we wouldn't know because I've been doing the same thing for private clients anyways. And we have clients all over, like in Indonesia, in Singapore some and like basically around Southeast Asia because like in, in America the time zones are very difficult. So to answer the time zone questions as well for, you know, the live calls and the live, the live stuff. Right? The like answering questions. What. Not going to have different time time slots. Right. Although this time is good for most people right now, the live stream you're watching, we still don't have like the infrastructure to let you choose which times that you're able to go on live and ask me and go through like the feedback together, which is very important. Okay, so let's see. So someone asked, my boy loves watching nursing times on YouTube in English. Whereas my mother tongue is Vietnamese. He's currently on stage one at age of three. Should I continue let him watch or should I leave him on the Vietnamese video? Oh, okay. So this is a global problem right now. That nursery rhymes on YouTube, the English ones are crazily popular. That a lot of children around the globe are starting to sing in English for no particular reason. Right. And it's especially a problem in the Southeast Asia portion where I am at least, and I see it as a huge problem. Right. So the thing is, you told me that he's at stage one. So the thing is it doesn't matter. You shouldn't even let him watch anything if you can. Right. Obviously there's a problem here, but what I'm saying here, I don't know who is asking this question. I need to check on Facebook. But what I'm trying to say is you need to start off with him asking for stuff from you and not learn from videos because that is not really, that's not really a way to communicate with you. He's not Doing anything, he's just watching, right? So you really need him to go through and talk to you. No matter if it's in like words, sounds or whatever, it needs to go that way. All right. You shouldn't let him watch videos unless it's for reinforcing him. All right? Or if you need to like deal with any type of bad behavior, then you would need to use video as a reinforcement. But at the end of the day, I really think if he's at stage one, meaning he still hasn't used words consistently, you should teach him using other means like toys, food, drinks, you know, video. You can also use it to tempt him to communicate with you. But all these stuff we've covered in the micro course, right? And inside the, inside the membership, if we're dealing with the stages, we're gonna talk about the most, like we're gonna troubleshoot basically. Because most of the time what happens is that parents get stuck on a certain thing that's specific to the child. I'm actually writing up the FAQs for the micro course and I'm going to put it somewhere soon, probably in a private Facebook group in the members one. But anyways, if you haven't, you need to join the micro course so that I don't need to repeat what I always say. But at this time you should really not let him watch and only use the YouTube as a bargaining power with the child to teach him some stuff. All right, Nabil. Hey, long time no talk. So Nabil says, oh, storytelling stage. Great. Actually teacher. Yeah. For any stage, play skills are always very important. Okay. And obviously those four stages are too generalized. But at the same time it gives you, you can gauge how far they are from where it started. That's the point of it. So if you do want to join and you haven't sent me a pm, you should because the demonstration just now was very short. But we're going to have a full on demonstration later on this, this week, most probably depending how the workflow is and dealing with all the uploads and making of the website and the lessons and stuff. So shoot me a PM if you do want to want to see it. You want to join the membership. I know a lot of you guys have done it already, so thank you very much. It gives me a lot of confidence to. Confidence to like keep on going. Okay. This is difficult, man. It's, you know, like it's easy to get on like, you know those parents talks that I've done multiple times, telling parents what to do, teaching Them what to do and then going in the clinic room teaching the, the child and then the parent what to do and then watching the parent do it and then give them feedback in real life. It's easy for me. And then we, because of COVID and actually before COVID because a lot of people were asking me, we start to teach over on WhatsApp and then Telegram and then on Facebook and then the micro course came out and the online course came out. But the next step is really to like, if we really like not to leave anyone behind and to support you as much as I can. I cannot just slap an online course to you like that micro course, which is a great course by the way. You should take it anyways before anyone does because you do get a discount if you do join. Okay? And you guys can, you can join it first. And if, you know, if the numbers are too, like there's too many people. I cannot take people outside of the, of the, of the course takers. Right? So what I mean is it's borderline, I think in my belief it's not good enough in my responsibility to only give you an online course and say, hey, here you go and go take it. Because I was working on the other online course called like Word Combiners, which has been like in the works for like the last month or two. But the problem was, I saw the problem. The reason why micro course and the introduction course, the full one, is very like mindset, is very like strategy as a whole. There are a few things that I tell you exactly what to do with your kid is because I'm scared it won't work. And then you get frustrated and then you don't want to do it anymore. Okay? The problem about like telling you step by step is because all children are different, as I told you. All children are at different stages, as I told you. And you misinterpret that your child can do something and cannot do something, which happens a lot, which a lot of, you know, parents tell me how come my kid cannot pray with me when they cannot talk. Right? So it's not about like, it's your fault or anything. What I'm saying is the level of thinking needs to be higher until. And then we can tackle, you know, different things for a kid. But you need to be able to be smart and, you know, identify where your kid is. Okay? Whereas if I just throw you a course about, oh, how to teach kids to talk in sentences, of course a lot of people are going to sign up, but at the end of the day who is actually going to understand fully what's going on and maybe do it in the correct way. Right. Because there are a lot of techniques that I need, I need to teach you and see and give you feedback on. And that's just the nature of teaching children in general, not just children on the spectrum or children who are delayed. Right. You need someone to look and say, oh, your style suits your kid or doesn't suit your kid. This, this thing you chose maybe isn't the right thing, or it is the great thing. Like, or maybe that after I see it, I'm like, oh, it's not even at this level. Go up, you know, make it harder or make it easier. Okay. Which most. Most of the time is the latter. Usually people are teaching something way too hard. Okay, so that's all for tonight. Thank you so much for everyone for tuning in. I know that after I tell you about these kind of stages, everyone's going to rush and say that, oh, my kids, at this level, at this stage, what should I do? Right? But hey, give me some time. Give each other some time. If you're, if it's a good fit. And you really think that, you know, you want to join a membership which is both a financial commitment and an actual, like a real life commitment. And it's more of the latter because I really think that it's a time commitment. It's a commitment that we are working together, especially on your part. Right. Because this is my job. But you guys have jobs of your own, right? You might be like a working mother, a single mother, a single father, a working dad with multiple children. I cannot even start to think about how busy your life is. And to give me that time and to give me that commitment is difficult. So I get it. So that's why for the, for both of us, a one off course is the easiest. Right? Just give it to you and you watch it. But I don't think that's the best way. What I think is the best way is we do this together in a membership. And you know, obviously that it's. It's a risk pooling, right? Everyone contributes a little bit of their time, their expertise, their finance, and it helps a lot of people down the way. And I think this is the best way I can help anyways, at this moment in time. All right. Obviously there are other things I want to do. For instance, move the whole Facebook group away from Facebook and onto our own forum on a, on an app. Right. On a phone and have adult. Adult people who have, like, who are on the spectrum, like autistic people. Right. Autistic adults. Sorry. Or adults who are suffering from apraxia speech. Adults who have recovered from speech disorders. Not recovered, but coping. Right. Or children who have caught up. Other parents who are like, like they've gone through so much, they have so much knowledge who can share on that platform. Right. I want to get them into that platform and then we can all like learn from each other and at the end of the day we can make a full knowledge base where people can search, watch videos and learn. Okay, but at this point in time we can't do that yet. We need to get through the first beta and that's why we're calling beta, right. This beta membership. So if you are interested you should totally just message me and then afterwards, like I know a lot of you guys have already through the messages and through email and stuff, but if you haven't, you should do it right now because I'm gonna go through each of you guys and ping you guys and tell you, hey, look, the membership is opening now. The membership's gonna like be like this. The demo is going to be like that and that's it. Okay? So thank you all for tuning in. I know it sounds like I'm like I haven't taught a lot in this, in this life but you know, it's a long term thing. I want to help, I want to do this in the long run online with you guys. So this is something, is my little, you know, my little plea to you guys like please PM me and tell me what's like what's going on. Tell me if you're interested and I'll see you in the next live probably next week, Monday. But during the week we will have a demonstration where I'll go live for a bit and I'll tell you, I'll walk you through the membership site like I have just now and how I'm going to use it. I'm going to put down like some real use cases, show you how it's going to work, show you some show basically show you some samples of how I'm going to give feedback and so on. Right. So that you know what to do at home. Okay, so that's all. I'll see you guys. Keep, stay tuned, keep posted because we're going full on in April. We're going to shut the doors. I'm going to not reply to so many PMs and help those members 100% first before we say, oh, we got something that's working for, you know, these type of parents. And then we're going to open up again. Okay? That's all. See you guys. Bye. Bye.