Friday Live: How Should You Prompt/Cue Speech and Language

Hi, Zavana. Good morning. Today I am going to talk about how to cue and prompt your child. All right? Because I've been getting a lot of questions about, hey, how do I do this, how to do that? And so I decided why not I just make a video about it and answer your questions live about how to do it. And if you're watching this on a recording, you can just let me know. Okay? You just tell me at the comment section and tell me what's going on. Okay. With your child at home and you don't know what to do. Okay. So you can, you can just let me know what troubles you have right now. Got it. So I just gonna keep on going and just tell me whenever you need anything. All right? So first of all, I want to say thank you for joining me here yesterday. We had a great live on my Instagram, if you haven't joined me yet, if you haven't followed me yet, I am on mainfunk speech. It's very different. So it's Mainfung speech on IG, it's agents of speech on YouTube, on Facebook, it's just Ming phone. For some reason, everything's a little different. I'm so sorry about it. You know, people are talking about. Not really just people, just my girlfriend. They're saying how it's all very incongruent, you know, but anyways, we're going to go ahead and talk about cueing and prompting. First of all, if you're watching this and your child has been through a lot of therapy, keep in mind, keep in mind that she or he has gone through a lot of prompting, and a lot of prompting becomes the new normal for them, all right? So yesterday during the Q and A, one of my clients asked me, hey, what if my kid is so obedient that she will only start playing or doing activity when I prompt her? All right? And this is very, very, very common. It's actually something called prompt dependence, coined by this woman on the Internet. But we won't go inside that, all right? Because the reason behind it is that. Not that prompting doesn't work, queuing sucks, or all these things don't work. The reason behind it is because the queuing and prompting hasn't been planned out, be faded out, all right? And so therefore, it has been difficult for your child to actually live without it, okay? So any help, any, any. Any help that you are thinking about giving, your child needs to be able to be faded out, all right? It needs to be able to be faded out. And I want you to Think about difficulty of doing a task in a diagram. There's an X axis and the Y axis. The X axis is how hard the task is. How hard the task is. It goes up. The Y axis is across different environments. So that's actually generalization. If you're not familiar with it, it means that if you're able to sing nicely at home in the shower. Okay. And the difficulty level is Celine Dion. They're pretty good already. But when you go to karaoke, you get cold feet and you drop in performance. All right, so across the x, Y axis. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm getting. All right, x axis is the horizontal one, right? Yes. X axis is the context. So in the shower, you're great. At the K room, you're. You're not that good on stage. You're a total hot piece of mess, you know? So generalization from one to another to another to another. And then the x and then the Y axis is about the difficulty of attacks. Let's put it inside a child now. Okay? So if your child can actually say certain sounds at certain contexts, for instance, in the clinic room with a clinician, you can do it. And that's because in that situation, I can help a lot. And they're comfortable with trying hard at that situation. So on that axis, at that point in time, at that context, can do next context at home, cannot. Right. Or a diminish of performance. So. And then in the public or in school, total mute. Don't even want to talk. Right? So you go. You see that the performance drops as he or she changes in different contexts. And I see that as. Because Ivana and Vonnie is here on Facebook. So thanks for always joining me, guys. It means a lot. So it just means that if your child is under the context of mom cannot do, but under the context of other professionals she can do, then there's also a difference in context, if you know what I mean. When they switch contexts, it will actually have a problem. Yeah. Savannah says when we try to make her singing, her voice is out. When I prompt her, no voice come out. Little whisper. Yeah. So that is also a totally different task. Right. One is singing. One is, like, voluntarily saying a sound. Okay? So the thing is, Savannah, I know that this is happening right now. So that's why I'm making this video. All right, so. So that's why I want you to go down one step is what I'm trying to say. Okay? So you have the step at where you are prompting her with, like, just the words or, like, two words. Or three words. So if that doesn't work and you've tried the highest help that you can do, go down the level. The difficulty. The level of difficulty. And by the way, I apologize for my crumpled shirt. My cat sat on it. It's like, you know, when I was a kid, he would say that my dog ate my homework, but my cat sat on it. That's why it's like that. Yeah. So what you have to do, Savannah, is to move down the difficulty a little bit. Just move it down, move it down. If up here, she whispers. All right, I heard from mom from ibu. Apparently that's how you call mother in Indonesian. Is that if she says like battery, she goes batter. Like that. Right. If that's the truth, then go down one level and try some two syllable words. All right? Or try some words that are easier or just sounds. Or maybe chop up the syllable, say battery. Read like that. Chop it up. See if it works. Okay. Whenever you see that a child is failing at a level, go down. All right? Failing at level, go down and help them. All right, so that's what I'm trying to talk about in this session. All right, so you have. Excuse me. So you have a lot of different difficulties, a lot of different contexts, and then what you can do is to prompt to help them to attain that difficulty level. All right? First of all, you have to know which difficulty level they're accustomed to. Okay? For Bonnie, that is just letting you touch her or letting you prompt her nicely or letting you turn her hand around or just sitting nicely. That's the difficulty level. The level of prompt, therefore, is to try to keep them at that difficulty level and making them succeed. All right, so how do you do that? So because you guys are watching, and there are some guys on YouTube, which I cannot see your names, by the way, on YouTube. Anyways, so how we do this is basically by setting the target goal and to stick with it. Okay, so for Vonnie, that is to create an open palm gesture. And the function of the language is so that she's asking and waiting for certain things. Okay, that's just what we want. All right, and if the difficulty level is here, what is the context? The context is she's sitting down with the biscuits right next to her. She can grab it. It's like that. So how do you do that? Is you keep at that until she becomes stable on the graph like that, at this context, at this difficulty level, with this type of help, she can. Until you hit a certain percentage of accuracy. For instance, if she can do it like nine times out of ten. Okay. Then we'll talk about fading away the prompt. So we did talk about when we hold it there, we can just like tip it and hold it and then put it there right away. Right? So if you're watching this, you don't know what I'm talking about at all. I urge you to watch some of my earlier videos about open palm gesture and the whole YouTube videos about like doing speech therapy at home. Okay? Those will clear you up a lot better. Okay. Today we're going in a little deeper, a little more technical. And I feel like that's the problem is because the difference between me and a parent, as a parent told me before, is that I see that the child is failing. I adjust and I never give up until I get what I want. Okay? Whereas parents are like, oh man, that doesn't work. It's too much work. That might be something that you're thinking, number two is the child doesn't like it. I'm being a bad person to them. And number three is you feel like there's no end to it. Right? That's why you don't want to do it. So at the end of the day, you as a parent, you have to have the mental guts to believe that what you're doing right now is good for her and to stick to it, but doesn't mean you stick to it until they become very unhappy about you. And this is what a lot of parents need to be careful about, especially those who are watching right now. I see your names, I know who you are. Is that you do not push them towards you. Do not push them too much. All right? The difficulty level is here. If you stick to it, they don't like it. Decrease it, okay? If you can't decrease it like Vonnie is at right now, it's just impossible to go lower. Then provide 100% help. Okay? And Savannah asks, is it because I don't do, do enough warm up? Yeah, So I think so as well. I think so. It's because the warm up is not enough and that she hasn't gotten into the groove to talk for your case. All right? If you suddenly tell her to do like a functional word or tell her to say a two word sentence, it's going to be difficult for her and the get go, okay? So I, I'd much rather, I'd much rather, even if she fails and she whispers, you just let it be and you just simultaneously produce with her meaning, oh, you want to help? Okay, say help me right say together, 1, 2, 3. Help me. Good. Here we go. Finish. All right. If she's okay with it, then, you know, try one or two more times if you can. But what I mean is, when I talk about, like, across the x axis, right, in different contexts, I want to talk about this more. Okay, so all the way to the left is the most unnatural, is where you do all the drilling. All right, so what are you doing right now, Vonnie and Sivana, what she is doing with me over the Internet, that's drilling. I'm drilling her. I'm teaching her structuredly, right? There's a structure to it. There's an end goal to it, and they can. They know that they have to do it in a certain way. That's all the way here. All right, let's say if you're learning how to play volleyball, this is where you're actually, like, practicing your spikes with the balls going up. And then. Or like, you see those tennis people with, like, the auto. Serving machine. The serving machine just. And then you go like that. You keep on doing it. And it's a drill, right? It's a drill. So you know how to do it. Everything. The environment is controlled. It's easy for them to actually do stuff. Okay, so once you understand that it's all the way here, let's say that, you know, you can hit a ball from a serving machine. Does that mean you can hit a ball in the game? No. Right? Probably not, because you don't understand. There's a lot more going on. There's something called cognitive load. All right, Cognitive load. Let me write it down. All right? Cognitive load. All right. And for you, Savannah, she isn't even. She's more than cognitive load. She is actually. She's got some emotions going on when. When that happens. So it's actually. There's even, like, emotional load. So there's two things that are affecting her, right? Whereas at the drilling, all the way to the spectrum over here on the X axis, when you're drilling her, there's no such thing. There's no cognitive load. There's no load to think about what to say. There's no load about how angry or sad or whatever to them. So therefore, it's much easier for her to do it over here. When you put it all over here in the middle, where, like, you're creating a situation for her to communicate, the difficulty level should go down. All right, let's say that, you know, we're back to the tennis analogy, right, from serving balls from a serving machine. That Goes only one way. And you know what's going to happen. All right? First, it's going to be a high ball and then a low ball, and that's whatever. I don't play tennis, by the way. And then in the game, your coach is going to help you do some easy rallies first, like back and forths. So therefore, if you're the coach in that situation in the middle where you're kind of in the game but you're not really and you're helping her, then the best way is actually to decrease the difficulty level and go maximum prompts, because it's hard for her. She's thinking about what to do next. She's thinking about something else. She wants something from you. So make it easier for her. And don't expect her performance to be at the same level as the drill part with me, all right? I'm the serving machine for you, for Savannah's case, okay? So don't feel like she should attain that. All right? Remember, remember, if you do. If you do therapy correctly in the drill phase, it will make your child so focused and so tired afterwards that they wouldn't want to talk anymore. All right? It's not only Zyvana's case. There's a lot of cases that come to me. They literally just fall asleep on the car or on the mtr, MRT or whatever you call it on the transportation. It's because I've loaded up their brain, I've fired up their brain with how to use speech and language. Okay? I've made connections, new connections in the brain through doing therapy. It might sound like, whoa, you're so cool. You're so good. Not really. It just means that I know how to drill someone. That's why when I tell you guys to do at home, just do it for five or 10 minutes because you can't keep the momentum going. I know I can do it because I've been doing it a lot of times, right? That doesn't mean that I'm better than you. It just means that I'm in a better place to do it as well. Because they know me as a serving machine. I keep on serving balls to them. That's my job. That's what you guys are paying me for, right? I create a situation where I can do it. Okay? So here is the most. Most unnatural where we drill and teach them new stuff. All right? That's how you do it. I don't know what you guys learn. When I was a kid, I learned mostly martial arts. This is where you just Stand on the ground and just learn new punches, right? You just learn new punches. And in the middle is that like, you know, you're half sparring, you're in a controlled environment where your master is teaching you some stuff but letting you off. All right? And then after, at the most natural end here is when you're just like hitting each other with no rules. And this is where it's conversational for kids. It's very hard to go from drilling to like, middle point to like, conversation. And you expect that they can actually put their skill at the highest level to over here. Impossible. Impossible in the beginning, all right? Very impossible. So please monitor your expectations. Okay? You wouldn't want that after, like, you're teaching. Let's say that you are learning how to dance, right? You are here watching a YouTube video, doing a step by step, or with someone just following and pausing, following and pausing, right? Just one move. Maybe you're learning the wave or something. I don't know. I don't want to embarrass myself. And then in the middle is like, maybe you are with a group of people doing the same thing, but longer. The last one is just freestyle. You wouldn't expect yourself to do all the things you learned here at freestyle fluently. All right? You wouldn't even be brave enough, you know, so that's the same as your child. Remember, they have problems with communicating. To them, learning this is like that, okay. In different situations, it's much harder. All right, so how do you prompt? How do you prompt? So at the drill level or any levels, it depends on how natural it is to actually prompt the furthest. Oh, and Zavana says now she falls asleep during the drilling. Hahaha. Yeah, sometimes that happens. That's why I tell you guys only five or ten minutes. All right? Don't go any anywhere more than that if I'm not around. Okay, so let's talk about some cues, some prompts. Not a lot of. Actually a lot of therapists teach you guys how to prompt, right? There's like. And they give you all these names, right? Because. And it's super hard to remember. So just let me tell you something, right? I like to categorize my cues and prompts in two ways. Number one is like, is it visual? And then number two, is it tactile? Okay. And number three, is it like verbal? So there's only three, to be honest. There's like visual, tactile, and verbal. Okay? So a lot of parents use a lot of verbal cues, for instance, for a physical thing, like Opening a palm or doing a gesture or signing or whatever. A lot of parents use a lot of verbal cues, which sometimes makes sense, sometimes doesn't. Because if you ask, what do you do? Or in Indonesian, they say like that, first of all, they need to have the connection between the word min da and the gesture. All right? Minta, by the way, just means like, ask or asking for or something like that. So if you haven't connected those two, your cue is ineffective. It doesn't mean anything. All right? Just like the first time I came to Jakarta, I was driving a car. I was trying to park. This dude was saying. I didn't even know what he was saying. It means left, by the way. And if you didn't add the gesture like that, I wouldn't know where to turn. To be honest, I wouldn't even know. There's no way that I would get it. Got it. So it needs to be effective. You need to know what you're teaching. If you're teaching something. If you're teaching something such as a gesture, a word, and you use a verbal cue for it, you need to realize that that verbal cue, she needs to know already what it is, or else you're confusing her. You're making a situation worse. Right? So a good example is the other day. Not the other day. A long time ago, actually, I was telling my girlfriend to, like, cook something in one way. But, you know, I speak Cantonese sometimes by accident with her. So I tell her without any gestures. I tell her, yeah, anyways, I don't want to tell you the whole sentence, but anyways, what. What I wanted to talk about is what I was saying didn't make sense to her. So I wasn't helping her. I was confusing her. She was getting angry at me. And then I realized. So I added some gestures so you could go that way, and I changed it back to English, okay? And then she understood. So you have to realize that verbal cues are slippery slope, especially when your verbal cues don't have any weight on your child. If it doesn't have any weight. What I mean by is, for instance, if you want them to look, you keep on saying, look, look, look, look, look, look, look, or something like that. Or you call the name thousands of times. I've said this millions of times too. Don't do it because it doesn't make any sense. So what you do instead is if you're trying to get them to look at you, let's say they want the watch, put it near your face, right? At least that's a Prompt, at least. It's not the best prompt ever, but at least it's a prompt. Prompt number two is get close to them, right? That's prompt number two. Prompt number three is you can put their hand on your face, right? See, I've never. When I prompt, I never try to manipulate the child's eyes because I can't. I can't put my fingers in their eyes and turn it to me, right? It's just impossible. It will hurt them or blind them or something. I wouldn't want that. So if you turn the head, doesn't mean you will control the eyes. What I mean is, right? So verbal cues, be careful. If you're not teaching children how to talk, don't use it. And there are very varying degrees of verbal cues, right? First is, the lowest level is just imitation. It's just imitation. A little up is like completion. So if you're teaching a word, you just give the first syllable. So for instance, my cat is called Slade. I want to teach it to a kid. I'll say slayed as an imitation. And then I want to only give the first sound. And we call sl, and the child will fill it in slayed. Good. And then I might even, like, chop up the first word even smaller. I don't even give the l. So what's her name? Yeah, slay. Good girl. Yeah, like that. So you see varying degrees of help. So other than this imitation to, like, filling the gap, you can also do it for sentences. So in the beginning, if you're teaching very easy sentences like sbo, like subject, verb, object. If you say like, mommy is eating the orange, something like that, the first time is imitation. The second time might be filling the gap. Mommy is eating. Yeah, Mommy is mom. And then just totally herself. So this is one way. The other way is you give a question as a verbal cue. But you have to be very careful as well, because if your child cannot answer questions, do not use them as cues because it will confuse them all, right? Cues and prompts should be already well established. That's why when we're doing speech tasks, like in Zevana's case, and our client is that I do not. I do not use things I build up cues to use later. For instance, the prompts, right? If I tell her that it's an E sound and I go like this because I built it, this makes. Actually there's some meaning to her, it will help her. But if I just do it out of nowhere is not going to help her. That's why I do the Warmups, by the way, Savannah, I tell her, I remind her that holding like that, like that, all these things will help her remind her of the thing. All right, so I've gone a little bit further and talked about tactiles, but let's go back to verbals and question. All right, if your child cannot answer questions, don't use them as cues. Simple as that. All right, Anytime, if you have any questions, put it in the chat, no matter if you're on YouTube or Facebook. I love questions. In fact, I just did one yesterday on Q and A. It's pretty cool. So when you guys are asking questions, just remind yourself, does she understand this? Is this helping her or is this complicating the instructions? Most of the time, it's complicating the instructions. Questions work better once your child gets to, like, three words per sentence, because then they can actually help. They can actually, like, think about, like, what you're talking about. So there's degrees of sentences you can give. Actually, you can actually give a choice question as a cue. So for instance, again, if you're teaching, mommy is eating orange. So when your child gets stuck, Mommy is eating. Don't know what to say. You can say, oh, is she eating orange or an apple? And then she'll say, orange. This good. Can you try again? Yes, Mommy's eating orange. Good job. Something like that. Or she gets stuck at the verb level, which is like, mommy is orange or mommy orange. And then. And then you're like, huh, Mommy's drinking or eating orange. You tell me. Drink. Oh, eating. Eating orange. That's right. So you give a choice. You give a choice to let them know. And then once your child knows where and who questions and what questions, and they can distinct between them. Now, you might say that my child already knows what who and where is. Right? So I want to tell you, can your child answer this? Who is wearing the gray shirt? Ming. Right. Who's wearing glasses? Ming. Not just who is that? Because that's a what question. When you point to something and you ask who's that? In your mind, it's just going to be a what? Because you're naming something, you're referencing something in the world. Right? Where is without any pointing, if I say who is. Who's got black hair? If they can answer Ming, then yes, they can answer who question. Right? Who's wearing the red shoes? Mommy. Like that. She can do it. Who's sitting down on the sofa? Mom. Right? No one in this case. I don't want to be freaky. Here. Yeah. And where is like, where is the mouse? And they have to answer on the table. If you point and ask, where is that? And they say shopping mall or McDonald's. That is still what question? That's still wet referencing. All right? They have to know where, as in the category about, like, locations. Who as a category of people. If they do the wrong, they give you the wrong answer with the wrong categories. That means that they don't know it. Right. Once they know these, you can use this as cues for sentence productions. Okay, Give you example. Give you example. So for instance, your child might say, hey, give me the remote. And then you want to become, like, a little bit silly and stupid. You're like, what remote? Where? I don't understand where's the remote? And you get something else. You might get the fan remote instead of the AC remote or the TV remote. And then you ask, where's the remote? And they have to be more specific. So they're going to say like, oh, get the remote from on top of the cabinet. And then you say, oh, right, that's correct. So if you want to cue that long of a speech, question cues are better. All right. Question cues are better because it lets them think about why you want them to talk longer. But if there's no point in talking longer, don't do it. That's also a very big problem. All right. Other than we're talking about, like, difficulty level, if you need to increase it in terms of language, you need to think about whether it makes sense to do it or not. If inside the room, there's only one remote, all you need to do is say, oh, give me the remote. Or like, can I have the remote, please? That's all right. If you want to. What I see a lot of ABA people do, right? Especially here in Indonesia, not saying that they're doing a bad thing, they're actually doing a good thing, but it's just not in the right context. So what happens is that they tell people, they tell the child to name stuff inside a room and tell them in the longer sentence, right? And the cue is actually say, oh, tell me in full sentence. But who decides if it's full or not? It's the therapist, right? It's unfair. Anyways, so what happens is they bring the child inside the room and say, oh, look, the green chair is on the floor, the black cup is on the table, the brown cat is on your lap. Something like that. So if there's only one cup on the table and in the room, it's just impossible. And unnatural for us to say that it's a black cup and it's also on a table. Right. There's no use for it. So you have to be careful. Later on, if your child is at that level, you have to remember, is it natural in that way? How would you say it yourself? I will just say, give me that cup. That's totally normal and natural. If you want them to talk longer, you have to create a situation where they have to, okay, make sure there's a few cups. Make sure there's like different color cups. Make sure it's different sizes. Make sure that you know, you can't see it. Make sure you're physically unable to understand or you pretend to be dumb and like do something silly. All right? Okay. So that's verbal cues. Be careful. Verbal cues. Slippery slope. Do not use it. Especially for you, Vonnie. Do not use verbal cues. Doesn't make sense to her at the moment. If she cannot even talk intentfully, then don't use it because it will just. She just think that it's one more instruction to ignore. Okay? She's been ignoring all verbal instructions anyways. So why would anyone think that she would actually use, actually understand verbal cubes as a way to help her? So we have to be a little more empathetic towards the kid and think in their shoes. Right? Let's go on. Let's talk about visuals. Visual cues are good. Visual cues are nearly the single handedly most important thing to get a child to talk. Okay. Most probably if your child is on the spectrum, visual cues work better than verbal and sound cues. It's just, it's just funny because the reason why is because when children are, they don't understand things using like auditory, like listening, they will look for different ways to understand a situation. All right, let me give you an example. I've said this in a new YouTube video and about like three signs about speech delay. You can watch it later. And basically is that if I don't understand what's going on, I would use my eyes to compensate to understand the context. Okay? So a lot of times parents come to my clinic and they say, hey Ming. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They understand what I mean. Like I tell them to like brush their teeth. How come I. The key phrase is how come I. They can understand like simple, simple instructions, but they don't reply to their names or like they don't do anything further than that. Well, the thing is, most probably even if you don't say anything or you say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? In their face and give the gestures, they will do it. All right? Given. Given that there are some contexts that are universal and children use it to navigate their lives and cope with it. We call it coping strategies. So, for instance, if you say, come, eat, and then you have the fork and the food put on the table, what are you going to do? You're going to walk there, right? You know, it's dinner time. You don't even need yourself to say anything, okay? If you turn on the toilet light and you put the toothbrush. I don't know, on the thing, and it's around that time, it's like it's nighttime and, you know, it's about to sleep, they'll know that they have to brush their teeth. So whatever you say, they're gonna do it. All, right? If your child isn't speaking yet or speaking, like, one word or something, if you say something crazy, they're still gonna do something. Like, for instance, I tried in front of a client, right? I gave them a piece of rubbish, and then I gave it to the kid, and I said, put this on the sofa, and he still put it in the bin, you know, so you see, the power of context and visuals have a profound effect on how children behave if they do not have the auditory skills to understand what's going on. Okay? And it happens to all of us. All of us, right? So, for instance, me, when I was in. When I was traveling around, like, Europe when I was like, a kid, right? What happened was I didn't understand a lot of stuff they were saying. And actually, Europe is not a good example. A better example is when I went to Mexico. So when I went to Mexico, all they spoke was Spanish. So all I could understand were the gestures and the numbers. And I only knew how to ask how much. When I still remember, I think it's quanta questa, right? But when I asked quanta questa, I understand the, the, the. The. The numbers that came back, obviously, because I needed to survive in, like, two weeks time, and I learned the numbers in one day. That's just how dire the situation was. It was very, very tourist unfriendly. No one spoke English even in Mexico City, right? I went to Mexico City. When I went to Cancun, the party island thing, they all spoke English, but in Mexico City, no one spoke English. So I had to navigate with just asking how much, knowing how much it is, doing mental math and understanding gestures. All right? So there was one time I was going to this pyramid thing, which is like a heritage of unicef it's called Tuti Wakan or something. And basically how to get there is like, we need to take buses because we weren't traveling with a tour guide, right? We did it ourselves. And I was going with this Hong Kong dude as well, but he had, like, very little English, even less than I did. And he didn't even memorize the number. So I was, like, carrying him, you know, I was, like, helping him out. So what happens is we go to the bus without the sign, and then we had to go up and ask if it's Thuti Hkan. And then afterwards, he was like. He was saying that we should get off at the fourth stop. And that's because I counted the number of head knobs. He did like that. And then I knew when I had to get off, and I had to ask at the fourth one when to get off to get there, okay? So I had to realize the gestures. I had to realize and use my brain and common sense to get over the language barrier, okay? And that's what your child is doing every day, which they don't really need to do much at home because they're the queen or the king, right? But imagine them at school. They're gonna have to do a lot of that. So let's go back to, like, visual cues, okay? We've gone a whole load of stuff. So remember in the story I did talk about, like, the head knobs and the pointing or whatever. Gesture cues are very, very effective. Super effective, but only if you build it. And you would know zavana, especially because your child knows how to sign. So when you sign, it becomes actually a mode of communication. It's a language of itself. All right? So what you want to do now is to talk slower. If your child is at no word level, talk slower. Add gestures, make it easy for them to understand, and then build it towards. So that when you do it, when you ask them to talk, they know that these gestures are helping them. Right? Okay, so what do you do? Pointing. Do gestures for. Sorry. When it comes to nouns, pointing is enough because you're referencing something in the world, right? Like this microphone, glasses, shirt. You can just do that as a gesture. But for verbs, you have to build them symbolic, right? Which is easier to obtain than speech. Okay? Gestures are easier to obtain than speech. If I went to Mexico City again, if I did this, everyone knew I wanted to eat. I'm hungry. Like, oh, I want to eat, right? Everyone would know that, okay? If they had any world knowledge at all. Or like, I'm like, right? It means I'm thirsty, I want to drink. So it's easier to obtain. It's across. I can't say it's universal because it really isn't. It's just that under the globalization nowadays, gestures are pretty much understood by nearly all, by nearly all human beings who actually know something about stuff. Okay. So, yeah, suggestures. Other than that, I also want to talk about mouth shapes and this. You should only use it if your child actually looks at you. Don't do it if they don't look. Got it. Don't do it if you don't look, because that's just stupid. You're just doing mouth shapes to the air. Right. Only use mouth shapes when they're looking. Got it. And then visuals, you might say, hey, how about pictures? Ming? Yes. Use a lot of pictures. Use pictures if you want. It's cool. All right, so what pictures should you use? All right, so for children who are learning how to. How to talk like one, vowels or whatever, I like to use these mouth shapes right here. These ones. You see, these two are the same, right? This one. So especially if your children are used to therapy, they would look at pictures and stuff as a way to like, oh, these are the stimuli. I'm more interested in the pictures than your face, which don't take it personally. It happens all the time, no matter with you or with anyone. So don't mind it. Just use it as an advantage. What other pictures do you want to use? Not a lot, actually. The best is actually the visual cues on yourself, your mouth, your gestures, everything. Okay, so the last one, let's talk about tactiles. Tactile cues are good for speech. Related problems for language, not really. Okay. And the reason why is because language is something that does not include touching as a sensation. Right. If you think about it, what does language talk about? Language is a set of symbols, a set of tools, a set of stuff that we all share. Right. If I say apple, everyone will think of the same image in our heads. It doesn't include the sensory input. Sometimes, you know, maybe the word smooth has. Right. Maybe the word rough or coarse or like bumpy has like a texture information. But why tactile is such an effective cue for speech is because speech is actually. Speech is what speech is actually is both a motor and a sensory thing. So that's why. That's why tactile cues work wonders on children who have a speech issue. And that's what I usually do first. Okay. That's what I usually do first with tactiles. Okay. So what kind of tactiles work? So first of all, you need to understand tactiles. Help your child get to a place. Usually when they cannot say certain words and sounds is because they don't know where to put their mouth. Okay? For instance, the M sound like that. Usually we don't. When we do the M sound, we don't go like, mmm, like that, right? We do it very relaxed. We go ma, like that. So some people like to put a piece of. What's that called? Tongue depressor. A lollipop stick. Put it here, like a wooden one, and do this and make them hold it there. All right. That's actually a tactile cue. But the thing is about tactile cues is don't make them exaggerate the action too much, that it doesn't make sense in speech. I've said this multiple times. Don't make them go like. Because in, like, if they get to a sentence level later on, which we're working towards, right? If you want them to, like, speak like that, then every. Every time the speech will be very slow. For instance, if they have to say like mommy, they go like mommy, like that, right? If you're teaching them like that. So what you need to do is you need to teach with tactiles that make them relaxed and get to the point where they can do it themselves. Right? For instance, for M, you can use the tongue depression thing. Doesn't matter. As long as it's very, very like ma like that. What I like to do is, like, the prompts, which I paid money to learn. I think it was quite a. Quite a good money spent. But anyways, two fingers here, one on the nose to signify some. The nasal sound, the no sound from M. Like that. Okay? For vowels, very easy, And then like that. So if you need help, just let me know. Okay. About tactile cues. It needs to be very dependent on the speech. Okay? Another tactile cue that a lot of people love. And it's actually started off. I learned it from this dude called Daniel ling. And this Dr. Daniel Ling is some white guy, this professor from America, I think. I think. And this is from the 1970s, and he teaches a lot of hearing loss children, like children who cannot hear. And tactiles help them create speech because they cannot hear the high frequencies and they don't know how long a sound is. So basically, you would teach the children to say, like, for instance, a long sound like ma like that. He would put like ma like that and show them how long by using the. The tactiles. All right, so I have. I need to go in like two minutes, actually, because I have a session right after this one. I want to prepare myself a bit. So if you have any questions, let me know. Put them in the comment section. I will be answering them through text. If. If you're watching this on a replay. Right. Do not hesitate. And we are going live every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 9am My time. And my time means W, I B, W, I B. And that's actually GMT 7 or minus 7. I always get it wrong. I think it's Jakarta time. Just search online, remind yourself if you have any questions and especially if you have any topics you want me to talk about, do put them in the comment section or just send me an email. MingAgentSofSpeech.com all right. And if you have it, you can go to agentsofspeech.com to check out the courses that were. That we offer. And also take a look at the checklist that we already have there. If you haven't, it's agentsofspeech.com checklist for all the tools and the toys that I recommend. And at the same time, remember that we will be making courses directly to serve you. So we have an introduction course which already, like around 40 people have signed up, which is kind of cool. And we've been helping parents that way, but I believe we can go deeper. So that's why I think in the next month, I'm still creating it. It's about, like, from zero to Words. That's the name of the course. And what we're doing there is like, if you've seen the video about tenure, there are actually a few clients of mine that have gone through the whole process from zero to words. And we've systemized it, we put it in a flowchart, and we made a course for it. We're making a course for it. So if you're. If you're interested, you can go to agents of speech.com, go to courses, and click the button to go on the waiting list. Okay. Because basically what's going to happen is that I feel like this is a very replicable way of parents to actually do this stuff at home themselves. Because imagine I can do with noor someone who doesn't even speak English. Right? Just imagine what you can do if you're understanding every word I say here, Right? So of course it doesn't take like, I'm just going to tell you. And it works. You have to really really, really dig deep. Dig down deep. Dig deep down. Sorry. And do the work every day. Okay? And hopefully you found this very helpful. Do stay tuned about from zero to words, especially later. I think after the later quarter of the year, I'm going to make a new course called Word Combiners, which just means that how do we make kids go from one word to like two or three words and answer questions? That's all it is about. Okay? So if you're Interested, go to agentsofspeech.com, go to the courses tab and wait list for whatever. But at this moment in time, I think the introduction course is good enough to help you elevate yourself as a parent. Because I just got like a video from a parent from my introduction course of agents of speech that she finally got the child to follow her instructions at home and look at her. So this stuff is good enough if you really follow it and do it and take the advice there. Okay. Because I've been teaching parents forever now. Not really forever, for like six, six years now. So it works, man. So go check it out. And with that said, thank you for tuning in today. I'll see you guys on Monday. Again on 9am Tell me what you guys want me to cover. Okay. Send me an email. Mingyagensofspeech.com Tell me what's going on. All right. Tell me what you need help on. The more specific the better. All right? Because when you tell me something specific, I need to go deeper. And when. When parents listen to me go deeper, they know what to expect and what the thought process is and how they can replicate it and take some of those stuff and use it on their kids. All right? So with that said, thank you so much. I have to go now, so see you guys. Bye. Bye.