Speech Therapy Techniques for Non Verbal | Step by Step Guide

Here are some speech therapy techniques for non verbal children that we use at Agents of Speech to teach parents. So what we're sharing here is what has been working for us. I'm not saying that you should do it or whatever, just use it as reference. And you may want to take some notes. Okay. The first thing that you have to think in your mind is that what route do you want to take when teaching your nonverbal kid? There are loads of ways that you can go with the AAC route, meaning using like picture exchange systems or whatever that a lot of therapists are actually taking a liking to. I don't really use it that much. I'm not expert, don't ask me on that. We do sometimes use it only on special cases. The second one is like being very naturalistic, going down to the, to the child, following the child's lead. Loads of therapists on the Internet are doing that, are teaching parents to do that as well. And then we have the more structured camp, which is within the realms of like ABA therapy. For me, I use a mixed approach for all of these and I tend to lean more on the structured, not because I use it more, but because when parents are learning it. If you're a parent, you're watching this, you need structure or else. A lot of times when you're trying, your brain cannot handle so many things going on. All right, you might think, oh, it's just playing with kids. But when you really do try, it's actually quite hard. So that's why you need to have a structured approach especially. And it's for you and not for a kid. Okay. And that's what's working for me when I'm teaching parents. I feel like if I'm trying to teach something more structured with a whole document of just like how to do from A to Z, it tends to work a lot. So if you want to see it, you can go to agents of speech.com course we made it free. The course used to cost money. We made it for free. There's a course inside of the platform called From Zero to Words. You can check that out. Anyways, we'll keep on going. So once you have decided what route to take, all roads, they lead to Rome. All the things that we're doing, at least the same outcome that we so desire. And that is verbal imitation. Why is verbal imitation so important? Well, it's one of the pure linguistic skills that a child should have. That's number one. And number two is like, how do you expect someone to learn a language if they don't know the concept of following or imitating or copying someone's speech. Right. It's impossible. So given that ultimate goal in mind, you should think in a way that is, whatever I'm doing, I'm going for that goal. Don't think about the other things just yet because if you don't get your child to imitate speech, it's very hard to go on to the next level and deal with even if some self injurious behaviors, you got a lot of different problems that you're dealing with, like potty training, all these things. Having your child's language level go up will actually help with all the other problems that are going on right now. It makes it so much easier to explain, so much easier to have your child calm down and so much easier to start having a social kind of relationship with your child of which we're going to talk about in the next point. Okay, so the first thing is I want you to start off with learning to learn skills and not starting with play. And this is like totally reversed with a lot of the things that are online right now. And I'm sure you're watching, if you're watching me, you're watching other people. I don't mind it. Choose a camp and stick to it and try it. All right? My stuff or the stuff that's been working for us may not work for you, but anyways. So if you're starting off with play, it's very difficult to follow a child's lead, especially if they're non verbal. The play skills aren't developed. And so what you see a lot of time is for our parents, like kids like to throw things, right? Or they like to hold something in their hand and they won't let go. Or they might just like bang something over and over again, use something inappropriately. And how do you follow the lead of that? Like are you going to shake the toy? You're going to try to hold another toy in front of your kid? He's not, he or she's not going to care. All right? And I don't say this in a way that oh, children who are non verbal and care about you. I don't mean that. So don't take my words in wrong way. What I'm trying to say here is that there's no point in starting off a play if there's no play skills, so to speak. And if you're trying to teach play skills, then you're not trying to teach verbal imitation because those are two different skills. They are intertwined, but they're different skills. Right. So that's why what I said was the ultimate goal is verbal imitation. So if you're taking an extra step to go to play and then come back, it's going to take a longer while. Right. Whilst it's more natural and it's easier to generalize, meaning it can be used in other places and use another toys, use another settings quicker, it's still a detour. Okay, what is learning to learn skills? So learning to learn skills is a very basic therapy kind of concept. Meaning is your child ready to learn it? So is your child able to sit with you for a prolonged period of time? Maybe like 10 or 15 minutes? Is your child able to wait? Is your child able to take instructions? If you stop your kid, is your kid gonna punch you? I've got a lot of bite marks from my first year of therapy being a therapist. But I'm telling you that some of the times, if you don't have learning to learn skills and you try to teach something, meaning like good behavior, so to speak, what you're gonna do is you're gonna hit a break wall, a brick wall. And it happened to me a lot of times. I'm saying you're trying to like wrestle with the kid, trying to get them to sit down. While I was trying to say ay, say Bs. They see I see that so many times when parents send me videos, especially in the early days when the world was under a lockdown, I would see parents who send me videos, therapists who send me videos, and they're like, am I doing it correct or not? And I see them wrestling, you know, like just trying to get the kid to sit down. The kid just like looks at them and walks off. They're not ready to learn. So therefore, you need to start by teaching learning to learn skills. So the next question would be, how do you do that? How do you teach learning to learn skills? Well, the first thing is, do they snatch from you? Is there anything that they want from you? What do they usually ask things from you? And you might be saying, ming, that's very low level. I'm a seasoned mother, I'm a seasoned therapist watching this video. And what you explaining basically is the very basic concept of mending, as in man, as in demand. So manning is a very ABA concept, meaning a very behavioral therapy concept. Right? And it means I'm withholding something and I want the kid to come over, communicate and give it to them. But in the speech therapy world, we call it Requesting. And I don't want parents to think that this is very robotic or whatever. Every kid ask for things from you. It's just the complexity of which, right? Because we have all the resources, kids don't. That's why they come to us and talk to us when they want something. So knowing what they want will lead onto that. You can teach something what we call open palm gesture. So open palm is just basically a kid going like that. And again, you can go to agents of Speech.com course. We have all the courses there and we have one called micro course which literally teaches you how to do the open palm and why open palm, right? So instead of the kid grabbing this from you, they're supposed to wait. So you're dealing with waiting already. Second of all is that they can turn take, right? Because waiting is a part of turn taking. They have to wait for their turn and they have to ask for permission. And when that happens, it means that they're waiting for your response instead of them trying to go out actively to grab that thing. And when they give up that control, they think, okay, I can just wait for my mom or dad. Then your game, you can start doing things in between when they're waiting because then you're not wrestling with the kid. And your kid isn't like crying and saying. And then you're like, okay, here we go. And every time you're saying cookie and he's like, he's crying and you give in. So we don't want that. We want to have a lower step which is the open palm gesture. Right? And we teach a lot of that inside of the free courses that we have. So if you want to just go grab it, the link is in the Description agents of Speech.com anyways, so once you establish the fact that your child is able to wait with an open palm when they want something and then you can create a routine around that to teach imitation. Remember the golden goal for nonverbal to become verbal is verbal imitation, right. Even if your child knows how to follow commands, right? Or play with a train track or I don't know, bounce up and down a trampoline. There's a lot of goals out there that are kind of out of the world that doesn't host them outside of the non verbal realm. So the only way that you can do that is to get your child to start imitating sounds or words, so to speak. So once you have the open palm and we have a lot of videos about this, you can go and check it out inside of the YouTube video. But for simplicity's sake, I'll just tell you a little bit here. Okay? So basically, once your child knows to do open palm, engage in a game, a toy, an activity, or with food, which is the easiest, that there are small pieces that the child wants from you. So let's say you're playing Mr. Potato Head and the Mr. Potato Heads there. And every time he just wants more body parts from you. So you're like, here you go, he's open palm again. Oh, hand, hand, good, go stick it up. And then he puts his hand out again and he said, oh, leg, leg, here we go. And you keep on doing that, keep on doing that. And then you start increasing the demand, meaning, oh, what's the what? What's one level lower than verbal imitation, which is action imitation? So you see if your child is able to sign with you or not. So maybe you'll do something like hand or like maybe something even more meaningless might be touch notes, of which we do use a lot. The reason is that these meaningless actions are, so to speak, a shaping behavior, shaping the behavior to learn how to imitate from us. And you might say, oh, this is very animalistic. It's like teaching a doggy. Like, if I got a puppy, I would do it that way. Well, kind of. But the difference between a puppy and a human, a baby, is that later on we can get rid of it and we don't need to care about it anymore. Like, we don't need to treat the kid as a robot later on. It's just a step. So when we, the child knows that they're supposed to imitate actions and then we move closer to the mouth and then we do some mouth shapes and after that we increase our demand again and it becomes sounds which are very easy, like, ooh, those ones. I'm sure not all languages in the world have a I, U. But simple vowels are easy because there's a specific mouth shape and it's a long sound that's continuous. So it's easy for the kid to start imitating like that. When you go from a simple vowel, it's much easier to go up to a word level. And therefore, I'm not saying that it will happen, I'm just saying that the chance of it happening is a lot higher. Okay. So you need to take a step by step approach. And that's why when you're thinking about getting your child to, from non verbal to verbal, there are loads of different reasons why your child isn't able to do it. So one of the reasons is because there might be some structural problems or neurological problems that actually prevent your child from actually using speech imitating speech. But if you're talking about a child who doesn't understand the concept of imitation, then all this would work as well. And by the way, if you don't do all of this right, all the action, imitation, whatever the learning to learn skills first, you will never know why a child is non verbal because you haven't even gotten to a level where you can test the imitation. A lot of the diagnosis or thinking about like speech disorders can only be done when imitate, when verbal imitation is established or else other than that, it's all guesses. It's very hard, it's very difficult for a therapist to give you a concrete answer about what's going on. Okay, so that's it. If you enjoy this video, please let me know in the comment section. And then at the same time, please go to agents of Speech.com course. We've got all courses covered from zero to worst to sentences and we're adding more as we are going on. And this is all free. You can go there, sign up, apply, fill in the questions that we have. It's on a platform called school and it's all there for you. I hope to see you guys inside there. All right, see you. Bye bye.