Ming from Agents of Speech shares how to prep non-verbal kids for home speech therapy. Focus on teaching waiting, turn-taking, and sitting still before targeting speech itself. Shape imitation through actions first, then verbal imitation, and talk less so your child has space to respond.
That's learning to learn skills. If your child isn't able to wait, take turns, isn't able to sit down and just be still and not snatch, that's going to be a huge problem. If you're in the uk, the NHS speech therapists now do a very similar model to us. We've been doing this way before the governments have been doing it. How do we get through this? The first step is, in fact, you should talk less. Second is how can you shape imitation as a behavior? If you keep on repeating the same word over and over again, the chance of them actually imitating you goes up. Right? But at the same time, can you have a middle step that you can provide? A lot of times we teach action imitation and we do it a lot. The reason we do it is not because it's fancy or something that a child should know, it's just a stepping stone to shape towards verbal imitation. Because if you don't have verbal imitation, it becomes very hard for the kid to actually speak. Because a lot of what we do in the world, when we're learning something, it's always imitation comes first, right?
