Wednesday Live: Speech Therapy at Home - What to Look Our For | www.AgentsOfSpeech.com

Things ready. Alrighty. Hey, everyone. Good morning. Good morning. How are you feeling today? In this video, I want to talk about this live. I want to talk about, like, home therapy. What you need to look for. And it might be a vague title, and what. What I really mean by what you need to look for is that what exactly do you need to know to do a good job? All right? Because in a lot of places, especially in. Actually, when I was in Hong. Let me start over. All right? When I was in Hong Kong, it's when we. We, us as therapists, we teach parents what to do at home. We give them a piece of sheets, and then on. On the sheets, it's like, oh, you need to do this, this, this three. Three things. And do it every day for I don't know how many times, and then report back in a week's time. Right? And then let me see what's going on. So this is kind of like a flawed method, since I've been teaching parents quite often now. And this is, like, experience from telling parents what to do for, like, six years straight. So what doesn't work is I give you a folder, I give you a piece of, like, paper, and on the paper, there's, like, a bunch of tasks that you don't entirely understand. But, yes, you've seen it before. I've done it in front of you before. But doesn't mean you'll know how to do it. Right. So that's the biggest problem. So what is the best way to do home therapy and what tasks are the best? So in your mind right now, when you're doing home therapy, it's very skewed because if you've been to, like, speech therapy, ABA therapy, whatnot, you will see that, like, 90% of the time your child is, like, sitting at a chair or sitting at a table. Or if your child is at school and you've seen her or him there, then it would be like. It would be sitting at one place for a very long time. But you have to remember that. You have to remember that it will be very different at home because at home, they're not used to sitting for so long. That's number one. Okay. Number two is that the environment isn't very inviting for therapy. Okay? It will only work better if you have the environment set up correctly. All right, we'll talk about that in a little. In a second. And the third is you. They're not. Listen. They're not, like, used to listening to you. They're used to you being a vending machine. You know, especially those who are on the spectrum or they are delayed in any way. They view parents as like a vending machine. I press certain buttons, a food is going to come out, you know, like I. I press some certain buttons, some funny noise comes out, you know, like, or, or you get a drink or something. So what parents think is that, oh, yes. Oh, they're just playing with me. Whatever. Not really. They're communicating. They're pushing buttons to get their means met. You know, like if they wanted something, they would come up to you and pull your hand or like cry or. I don't know. That's the way of them pushing your buttons. Right? And sometimes when they push your buttons, they want, like a response from you. So if you give a response, you laugh at them. They get reinforced. They like, they're treating you like a vending machine that makes sounds. You know, they're like, oh, wow, yeah, I can do that. And at that moment, they might look at you too, which is excellent. Which if that's the case, we have to build on it. All right. All right, so back to these three points, right? The not used to doing things at home. The environment isn't good for listening. Number three is not used to listening to you. These three things are very. It's actually something you can change. All right? So you have to scrap away the things that you have seen in therapy or wherever. You might say that, hey, my child listens so much better to, like, professionals. When someone wears like a suit or something and then they listen better and they do stuff that I've never seen before. Right, that's fair. Because they've got authority because they've, they've. Those people are wearing different stuff. It's other than normal. It's like a policeman in a. In a uniform asking for your id. You're going to give it to him. Whereas someone who doesn't have the uniform and says he's the police, you wouldn't even believe. Right? So it's different. And kids are very good at looking at these cues because frankly, that's what they use to actually. What they actually use to get. How to say, get by in this society, because they can't really understand much with their ears. Okay, so how do we change this? So first of all, don't even think about. Don't even think about having your child being able to listen to you at home for extended period of time. So what you need to do in the beginning is to actually. Is to actually scrap the sitting down for long periods of time, because that's just impossible for the child. So what you should do instead is just five to ten minutes. As I've talked about this, like, multiple instances, but since parents have been asking me, dude, only five or ten minutes, and they go ahead with like, 30 minutes. Right? Not the best thing, man. Not. Not the best thing. So why do I say this? Because we're all skewed by the therapy, by the therapy and the therapy room. They've been sitting for a whole hour while they're doing something. And as parents, we measured how good a therapy is going by if the kid is listening to us. But as parents actually usually, like, the 100% of the case. All right, parent therapists, we know how to make children sit down partially, is to show parents that you can trust us, right? But in the beginning, you don't want to lose the trust between the child and you and the. And you and the. And the parent. So as a therapist, you have to be, like, right in the middle. But you as a parent, you don't need to care about this stuff. So five to ten minutes only. And the reason why is because usually children, they learn in short bursts, right? Human beings, we learn short bursts. And there's a study, if you are interested, I'll send it to you. If you want to, you can DM me, but you can just listen to me. I guess you can trust me about this, is that if there is a. There's a study that talks about, oh, what. What's the best method to give therapy? And most of them say that, oh, it's best if you give, like, short bursts. Like, if there's a summer camp, there's a boot camp for language therapy. And then every day they go for, like, one hour for, like, two weeks. That should give the best therapy yield, as they call it. So what that really means is that you don't need to. You don't need to have your child go through therapy every day for three hours. Which, you know, Aba is saying, like, two hours a day every day. Right. But what I. What it means is that short bursts help your child a lot and especially for speech cases. Whereas, like, your child has problems pronouncing words and sounds. Those cases is actually, like, around 10 minutes every day just to do a quick drilling. I'm actually using an app called Duolingo. Have you heard or heard of that? Just to learn Indonesian. And apparently when they used. They made the app for language learning, they optimized it so that it's like short bursts. So if you use the app, it takes around one minute to finish, one go. And you're not supposed to do so many goes in one time, right? It's more, like, consistent. Every day you do like two or three times of those little quizzes, and then your language will increase. And this is backed by evidence. So why do we opt to do, like a whole hour in the therapy room? And we only do it, like, once per week? And the reason behind it is because of economics, basically, because it's more economically viable for you to come to the therapy for one whole hour so that you get the most. You know, you travel to the therapy center, that's like maybe half an hour, 45 minutes. If you only stay for 10 minutes, that's really stupid. So I guess that's why. All right, so what, what you should do at home is still five to ten minutes every day. Five or ten minutes every day. And once you get into the groove of it, you want to do this five or 10 minutes, like every single day without a break. So seven days a week, right? And the reason why you want this to happen is because you want to build a habit. And when you build a habit, study says not only in a therapy world, right. But building a habit, it takes around 30 days of consistent action and 90 days to really solidify that habit. So I've been trying, actually, when I first moved out, I've been trying to build a habit of making my bed, right? So right now, if I don't make my bed, I feel internally uncomfortable that it must be done right. So it has become a habit already. My bed is always made. So to me, that's automatic now. I don't need to think about it. So that's what I want you to have with your child, is that it needs to be. It needs to be automatic. It needs to be a habit. Right? So let me know in the comments. Give me a yes. If you're already doing daily things with your child and it's already a habit. All right. And let me know if you have any questions about anything I'm talking about today, anything that crosses your mind, what kind of troubles you're looking into. I see a few familiar faces here. Hi, Vonnie. You're always here. That's so cool. Let me know how it's going to be. And Anna, thanks for supporting me and stuff. Let me know how it goes at home and tell me if you've already built a habit into your home therapy already. Okay, so five or ten minutes. Is this all the way till the end? No, I mean, like, it depends on the task, right? So basically, if you draw a pie. Pie chart of therapy, there's a huge chunk at the therapy center that you see a structured task, right. That you see you sitting down the child, and then you're doing like flashcards or whatever and you're doing like structured play and all that stuff. Right? So a huge chunk of that is what we call like clinician directed or like, I guess it's parent directed if you're at home. So a huge chunk of it is we direct it. If you see it from a therapy room, what I'm saying is at home, it should be very little that you're directing the child. You cannot. You cannot actually ask the child to do anything for a very long period of time if you don't have their habit of listening to you. So this is what I'm going to go on to talk about. If you want to increase the therapy setting down time, the structured task time to longer. And to be honest, I really, really, really recommend that you only extend it towards like 15 to 20 minutes max. Okay. There are some people who are doing more who are like my clients. And I always talk about Tinoy because I can talk about Teno. All right. I've got her consent, which is pretty cool. So she's actually doing an hour a day. And there are some drawbacks, but I really want the kid to catch up in terms of vocab. So, you know, as long as she doesn't make him cry, then I think it's fine. Right. But to be honest, that one hour is chopped up into like 4, 420 minutes, right? So go figure. You have to find a groove for yourself and your child. All right, so how do you increase that time from 5 to 10 towards 20? Right. That's the maximum I would recommend. How do you do that? Well, it really is because of micro commitments. Okay. Hey, Vonnie. Yeah? She said sometimes I did only less than five minutes. Like, only three to four is okay because I don't want to give too many snacks. Of course that's okay. Of course that's okay. That's totally fine. It can be like very short bursts if you want to. It doesn't need to be always five minutes. It's not like you must do five minutes. Not like that. It's just enough, you know, enough of your child listening to you. Then it's fine. Cool. Yeah. So I was going to go back to micro commitment. So what is micro commitments? I did talk about this in a previous life. Basically micro commitments, just to refresh your memory and Refresh my memory is basically the study of someone telling someone else to do something that is small in commitment. So that once they get their feet into, into their door, they can do more stuff, okay? They can ask for more things. So for instance, for Zevana's case, how we do micro commitments is by giving a free gift, which is sausages in our client's case, if you're able to get them to say yes to the sausage, then along the way a lot of things they're able to say yes. So, so this is a little different from bribing. We're not actually bribing the kid, remember when we're offering a reward, it's also a decision on child's part. They're smart enough to make a decision. So when they make a decision to say yes to your reward, that's actually a micro commitment because then you can actually get them, command them and ask for even more. So whatever you're doing that five or 10 minutes, or in Fonny's case, three to four minutes, that's actually building a solid like therapeutical relationship between you and your child, which is by asking them, hey, do you want this? If you want this, do something. If you do, if they do it and they let you touch them, let you flip their hand, let you like prompt them and everything, that's a micro commitment. Okay, so why does this work? So there's a study I want to talk about and might be a little like long winded, but you know, stay with me, it's really quick. So basically what happens is someone. I watched this on a TV show actually. So basically what happens is that this dude goes to a bunch of girls who are picnicking on the grass and then he's like, oh, do you mind if I put this, this hoop around you guys? And you cannot go out. And then the girls are like, of course not. What, what are you talking about? Of course you cannot put a, put a ring around a hoop around us and we cannot go out of that ring, right? And then he's like, okay, then do you mind if I like just put the ring like really huge, like, like 5 meters from you and you cannot go out. And then the girls are like, yeah, sure, okay, fine. So the guy started to do it, he put like a ring 5 meters around the girls, like 5 meters by radius, I mean like, like this really big. And the girl's like here. And then next the next question, the guy's like, hey, do you mind if I make the circle a little smaller? And the girl's like, yeah, whatever. And it becomes smaller, right? And then he asked again, hey, do you mind if I make it smaller by, like. Like 30 centimeters? And then they're like, okay, yeah, sure. And then slowly, as he asks more, it becomes like this, right? And it's exactly the hoop that is, like, supposed to surround them at the first instance. So what you get initially is that if one demand is too much for someone, you ask them for a very small demand, and then slowly increase it and inch forward. You will be able to get their commitment for big things. Okay. And in a lot of cases, we need to use this for children, okay. Because anything that is too difficult for them is a stretch. All right? Anything that is too difficult is a stretch. All right? And anything that is outside of their comfort zone, all right? Is a stretch. Ready? So for children, there's a circle. And a lot of people have used this analogy about, like, a zone of competence, right? Or like a zone of development. And even, like, who's that dude? Warren Buffett. Have you guys heard of him? So Warren Buffett's this investor dude. He only invests inside his zone of competence, right? So anything out of that, he's not comfortable with doing unless he learns about it. So it's the same as children. There's a really big circle going around to talk about this. So if you're telling your child to do something outside of their comfort zone, then you're asking for a big commitment. So instead, you should give small, small, small commitments, micro commitments until they're okay with listening to you. Yeah. So tell me if you're doing this already. If. And ask me if there's any problems with, like, dealing with this kind of stuff. You're watching this on recording or on YouTube right now. Hi, people on Facebook. Let me know more. So how you actually do micro commitments is pretty easy. Okay. And you don't need to reward it always. All right. And the reason why children are more inclined to listen to me and to be honest, it's not about the how I dress, right. If you come to me in my clinic, I'm still in the teacher. I mean, I still. I look as right now, like, it's the same. All right? I'm not in, like, a lab coat some. Or like, a suit. I used to wear, like, a shirt, but, you know, I don't. I don't think it's a. I need to. And people think that because of the lab coats and the shirts and whatever, it makes it easier for children to comply. No, it's dressing for the Parent, Right? So it's not really like child centered. So how do we do micro commitments is actually by saying something and then making your child do it. Okay, so what does that mean? So, for instance, sometimes as a parent, I've seen it many times, right? We give offhanded command, right? We might tell the child to put that back in their bags, right? If they're like, playing with something, hey, put it back. And obviously your child's gonna ignore you. They're gonna keep on playing, or they're just gonna ignore you, like, just flat out. Or they might look at you for a bit, right? And then you repeat yourself and you say, hey, put it back. Time's up. Put it back. Still no action taken. So how you do a micro commitment is that these offhanded commands or whatever, you will have to. You'll have to help them finish it. So when you say, put it back, you take their hand and then you stuff it back in the bag and say, good boy. That's it. You say it once and you help them do it. Let's see what they're saying. So Zavana says, hi, Meng. Hi, Savannah. She wants to do it with mom now. This morning, pulled her mom for practice. She signed five minutes. Yes. Good. So the sausage thing is a small commitment, right? That's really good. And then Lacacia, sorry if I'm butchering your name. And she says, my son is 3 years old, tends to talk more with his therapist. He'll use sentences and. Yes, no, but more baby talk at home. Is that because she's established that level of commitment? Yeah, so that's actually a very good point. And that's exactly the point I want to talk about. Like what. What is the difference between you and a therapist? And why is your child doing sentences at the clinic room and like, babbling at at home? Right? So basically, I still want to talk about. Yeah, I'll keep on going just to answer your question. Right? So if you. If you give those commands, those offhanded commands, and your child just doesn't do it, you need to say it once and then make them do it already, okay. And make sure the things that you command on upon needs to be something actionable, that you can take their hands and do it, or else it's not going to work, right? So for instance, you say open the door. So you take the hand and you open the door for them, right? So these commands, you have to make that commitment. Let's go on to the environment. This is huge, by the way. Lakeisha. Sorry, I really don't know how to pronounce your name. Please correct me if I am being disrespectful. How you can make your child talk longer is basically to control, to control the environment. All right? At the therapy center, everything is optimized. At least I hope so. The one that you're going to, there's a, there's a table, right? There's a chair, there's two chairs. Maybe it means that there are two people who are gonna be sitting down there. There's toys and the cupboard, which are all locked up and closed. What does that mean? It's restricted access. You gotta talk, you gotta do something about it, you. In order to get it. So children get that, understand that, and they will do their best because they know there's nothing else to play with. The gatekeeper is the therapist, right? So my first advice for you, for you to like do things at home is to lock up the most sought after toys, the whatever toys like the man. It's not that fun toys, you can put it on the floor, on the mat. But the ones that are new are fun like Thomas trains, transportations, car slides, bubbles, you know, balls that make sounds and whatever that are really fun. The really fun ones, put them in the cupboard, all right? And make sure that your child can only use it when you're around. Okay. It's just like when we talk about like doing the open palm gesture in our online course, you should only use snacks that are like a plus plus, right? If you take your girlfriend out for dinner, you don't want to treat her McDonald's. Well, I do, but, you know, not every time, you know, like. But what I mean is you got to treat her the best stuff. Like if you were going out on a date that was like for. What's that for? Anniversary, dude, you want to take her to the best steakhouse, right? So it's the same thing you want to take the best stuff for, for them. And you cannot give them, to give it to them every day because if you give it to them every day, it's not going to be something that is, that's going to be treasure. Treasured, right? If every day we go out and we ate steak, then it's not going to be something cool and no one's going to look forward to it. In fact, they will get pretty fat. You know what I'm saying? So at the end of the day, you have to lock up those stuff that are the most treasured by your child so that you can only use it at certain Periods of time when you're interacting with them. You can only play this with mom and dad, end of story. So therefore they have a reason to talk to you. And the reason why we do this is not to be a bad person or anything. It's just so that we're mimicking what we're doing in the therapy room, right? In the therapy room, you're not able to get what you want unless you do what I say. Same should be true at home. There are some stuff that's free, okay, there's stuff that's free, but there's. If you want the good, good stuff, you gotta work. All right? So at your home, I'm hoping that you have a corner, you have a corner with a table that you can put the therapy stuff there. So whenever you tell your child to go over there, remember the analogy of a habit, right? You must work at a certain corner of the house. You must, I don't know, you must go to the toilet at a certain time of the day. You must, I don't know, do the laundry at a certain time. Same. You must have a certain time. You do therapy with your child. So you need to find that time that is. Does good for actually doing therapy. So how do you even find that thing? You just work it around your schedule. To be honest, since you guys parents are the most are actually the ones who are very busy. So for instance, for right now in the pandemic and we're all at home, you got to find a time that makes sense for you to sit down consistently at the same time, right? You, you've got to find that window of time so that you can sit down. And you got to do it consistently so that your child knows, oh, it's nine o' clock, time to do therapy. And then they just walk there without any hiccups or you're not pulling them anymore because it's already a habit. Just like this live I'm doing. I made it Monday, Wednesday, Friday and 9am Just so that it becomes a habit for me and I don't need to think about it, okay? So that actually helps you on the second, on the second thing, which is creating environment just like a therapy room. Okay, creating environment. How do you do it? Number one, chairs, table at a corner, right? Very structured setup. Number two, all the toys that are nice, are cool, are good. Put it, put it inside a C cupboard, lock it up. Don't let them have the good stuff, all right? Only use the really nice snacks for the hard tasks. Lock it up, don't Let them have it. They can only have it when they're doing therapy with you. Number three, set the time. Set the time. Have a, have a time that you will sit down with the child and do stuff for five to 10 minutes, all right? And then slowly work towards 20 minutes if you want to. Do not go anywhere more than 20 minutes or else it'll be very hard. So if you think about it, so yeah, so if you think about it, why I said 20. I said 20 at the max. How long is, how long is a lesson in primary school? The answer is around like 30 to 40 minutes, right? How long is a lesson in secondary school? One hour. Right. How long is a lesson, a lecture in university? Two hours. Yeah, right. 1 1.5 to 2 hours. How long is a lecture in Masters? For me it was three hours. How long? Right. Masters is three hours. How long about the, how about the tutorials and all that stuff when you're doing research, dude, that's the whole day. So if you think about it, the education system is like systematically increased, right? And then usually it just, it just means that children who are below three or like around two to six, they have the attention span around 10 minutes, man. That's the maximum you can go. So I got some questions on YouTube. So Sabrina says why the chair should be in the corner. Okay, that's a good question. The answer to this is basically as simple as because if your child runs away, there's only one direction they can go which is away from the corner. So you can stop them before that happens. That's the answer. And if you put it right in the middle, then your child will always walk past it. And you don't really want that because you only want them to walk towards it when it's the real time. Therefore, it's more intentful when they walk there. Okay, Sabrina, so there are two reasons, right? Number one is if it's at the corner, if they run away, there's only one direction they will run. It's easy to catch. And you don't want them to run away from therapy. You want to stop them. All right? And number two is if you put them in a corner, it's away and it doesn't remind them every day, you know, of going to that corner. All right? It's harder to actually walk past it for a child and it makes more sense. I like it like that. I like it at the corner for my therapy room. I also put it like, I sometimes put it right in the middle because smackdown, like you go in already therapy don't even think about it. But at home, it's easier if you put out the corner. All right? Nabil on YouTube says. Exactly. My daughter has also got a habit of sitting down on a study table by herself. Because it's a habit. Yes, it's a habit. So you have to make a habit. Savannah says Ming, should we move her to a corner, too? Do you think we should we move. She does not like it now before, she always in the corner. Oh, okay. I don't know, man. I think it's actually. It's up to you. I think you can try anywhere. But it needs to be consistent, okay? Why I want. It just needs to be consistent, okay? So that the habit becomes a thing. And she's. Savannah, our case here is a little older, this client of ours. So even if she runs away, we can't stop her. And the thing is, the whole house is basically her castle. You know, she's the queen. So it really depends, Sivana. It's up to you. As long as it's consistent. Okay. Right. So where was I up to? I was talking about, man. I totally lost my tracks. But anyways, so I was gonna talk about. Give me a moment. I'm just thinking about where I was. Yeah. So when you set up a timetable for your child, right? You already have the timetable. You already have the habit in place. You make the chair and everything like that. You set a time limit and, you know, the attention span of a child, then great. Okay. Do not expect anything more than 10 minutes of focused work from a kid. It's just impossible. Impossible when. When parents tell me, oh, my child isn't focusing at home for good reason. Because, you know, if you try to drill someone more than 10 minutes and they still don't understand the task, it's going to be a drag. Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about. So since we already covered how long, where the setting, like micro commitments, instructions, all that kind of stuff. The last thing I want to talk about in this live, which I'll talk about for a long time, by the way, is about giving good instructions. All right? Giving good instructions. So at the first 10 minutes. No, for the 10 minutes. The first one minute. Most of what you do should be ensuring that your child understands what you want them to do. That's the biggest, biggest thing that you need to understand. All right? Why children will do something is going to be because. Sorry, the YouTube thing keeps on, like, auto focusing, which is very, very distracting. I'm sorry for this, by the way. You. Yeah. If you're watching this, like, on YouTube and Facebook. Keep commenting and let me know what you guys think about this and tell me what you guys want me to talk about as well. These lives are just going to be like me. Keep on teaching. I can do it for a long time. So if you don't stop me, I'm just going to keep on talking about the stuff I want to talk about. So you tell me what you want me to talk about so we can be on the same page. All right, so where was I? Yes. Giving good instructions. So you need to set your instructions so clear that at the first minute of sitting down, they know what to do. All right? If someone doesn't know what's happening, they're puzzled. They're using a lot of the brain to figure out what's going on. And if your instruction isn't clear, they don't know why and what is happening. It's very easy for them to just walk off. Right? And I want to just tell you in a. In an example, an analogy. So basically, if you do not watch football, you don't understand the game, you don't understand the rules. You're not going to watch it, man. You're not going to enjoy it. You watch like two seconds, like, maybe there's a football star that you like that's pretty handsome, you know, and then you see him for a bit, and then that's the end for you, you know, that's as much entertainment value you get from football, right? So you don't understand the rules. That's why it's not fun for you. Whereas, like, if someone else, like your husband or your boyfriend or, you know, a girlfriend who likes football as well, or when people watch, they know exactly what's happening, right? And they can see what's going to happen, and they anticipate it, and then they will know what to do. So the key word here is anticipate. Can your child anticipate what's coming? Right, so, for instance, if you are teaching your child to speak in sentences, if they cannot anticipate the fact that they will have to talk, then you have a problem because they don't know what to do and you will result in something else. Right? So how do you give good instructions and lay out the task so that they know what's happening? Well, you have to demonstrate. You have to demonstrate a lot of times. Okay, for instance. Okay, for instance, for a game as simple as Peekaboo, which, by the way, I'm going to have, there's a video I'M going to release this week about playing, about building routines yet again. So if you don't give them the correct instructions, they don't know how to play something as simple. As simple. As simple as peekaboo, which a lot of parents fail to do at home, is because you haven't given them the correct demonstrations. So what I mean by that is, for instance, if we're doing peekaboo, right, if we're teaching them and you want to play this kind of stuff with them, usually you just go like, peekaboo, like that, without giving. You just jump straight into the task. You need to think about why it's fun for them. First of all. First of all, if I cover my eyes and I go like that, you're under the assumption that your child likes seeing. Like seeing you reveal your own face, right? What's more fun, what. What makes more sense is that you cover your child's eyes, right? You cover them and you go peekaboo like that. So that it goes from black to light, and it's actually very like. What's that called? Very obvious, what you're trying to do. Make it obvious. Make it obvious. Okay. Once you make it obvious, you build anticipation. So, for instance, you pika. And then you stop. You stop. You use that pause as a cue. As a cue to tell them that something's going to happen next. So when you stop and you say boo, and then you will see your face, which is cool. And you do it a few times until they understand, and then you add the language inside. Okay? We don't even think about teaching unless they understand the context. Without the context, you cannot teach language. All right? So a good analogy is that if you're teaching them how to speak in sentences, they need to know the vocab for each of the words inside. And I see it very often that parents get out a picture book. Sorry, I don't have a picture book. Right here. Is that they start talking about it as if the child knows everything, and they try to make the child say the sentence. So, for instance, they would say, once upon a time, the girl went to the house. Like that. But the thing is, first of all, you may identify what level your child is at, right? And second of all, you need to know. You need to know that she understands all the words that you're about to give her without knowing the. That she knows the vocabs. It's very difficult for you to actually tell a story and make a sentence, all right? So a better way to do it is to go through the whole picture book to demonstrate that all the words there are known. If they don't know, teach the words first. Right? That's how you do it. You teach the words first. You explain and describe the whole book to them a few times. Describe what's happening, make it fun along the way, make it clear what you want them to do. Right? And then they will understand. Okay, so mom or dad has got my back. They will help me when I don't know. So it's fine if I don't know. And it's fun to play with them. And the task is clear. All right. Sometimes when you tell a story with a picture book, and I've seen it many times when parents come to my clinic, I make them show me how they interact with children. So they take out a book and then they start saying, oh, what's this? Oh, no, no. They literally just start talking about the story, which is good if your child is not language delayed. But if they are, then. Oh, God, you got to be very careful. You have to make sure the vocab inside is correct is all understood. So I would actually, like, start by just me pointing. I would just say, like, oh, let's point to the horses. 1, 2, 3. There are multiple horses. Right? And then I'll let them do it. Okay, so Nabil says voice modulation. Modulation is best for reading picture book. Yeah, I don't know. What is voice modulation, Nabil? Let me just check, like, Google what that is real quick. What is that? Voice modulation is when you control or adjust your voice to choose to go louder or softer. All right, so just. It basically means pitch variation, right? And using a lot of, like, making it fun up and downs. Right? Yeah, that. That would work. That would work. But what I mean is, like, you have to make it clear what you want from the child. Is she only listening? Is she to read to make sentences, or is she to point to you or is she to answer questions? Right. You have to make it very clear. And before you do all these, you need to make sure she understands all the pictures inside, all right? If not, it's going to be very stressful because they're trying to do a few things at the same time, right? You only want to do one thing at one time. One thing at one time. All right? So what I mean is if they don't know the words, then they're trying to learn the words, and then you ask the question. That's. Then they're trying to comprehend the question. And then you're also trying to tell a story. So they're trying to comprehend the story. So you got to do these things one at a time at home. Okay. And I know you have. You must have seen, like, therapists that are doing few things together and that. And that's because they're using, like, they're doing one thing at a time within the task. Right. So it's very hard for me to explain right now, but you have to be careful. Okay. And I like to use, like, picture book is one of them. The second problem is if you're doing, like, speech tasks, right. And you do, like, oral massage or whatever. People love oral massages. I've. I've never really gotten into oral massage. I should. The. I was going to take a course about oral massage to see what it's all about, but because of Pandemic, I'm not able to do it. I'm not a big fan of it, but I want to learn about it. But the thing is about oral massage and doing speech tests is that it's also not well demonstrated. Right? So the best way to demonstrate it is to use the tools on yourself. If you're using, like, some sort of talk tools or whatever, do it on yourself. Do it on a teddy bear. Let them do it on the teddy bear or yourself or the parent. Right. Or someone else so that they understand what the task is about. If you do it just on them without any explanation, it comes with rejection. And plus, this is how you get, like, oral defensiveness, right? They don't like stuff inside their mouth. They defend their mouth. You need to let children understand it by demonstrating it multiple times until. Until they are actually okay with it. And then you can go on to do these things. Okay? So no matter what the task is, you have to demonstrate until they understand. And that happens in the first one minute. If you can't make it one to two. If you can't make it three. Okay. And once they understand the task, teaching it will be super easy. Super easy, Right. Even. Even sitting down, you should teach and demonstrate why the. The how you teach sitting down is basically by, you know, prompting, praising and rewarding and telling them and demonstrating that you are sitting down. Right. And demonstrating that when you sit down, you get good stuff. Right. So at the end of the day, it really comes down to repetition. Okay. And do it until they understand. So I am coming down to the last five minutes of our live here, and if you're watching this and you haven't, you should head to, like, agentsofspeech.com we've got a lot More good stuff over there and information. There's a blog, there's an online course that you can take a look if you want to. If it's a good fit, then join us. We've got, like, live calls every month that are tailored to our members. And you also get a lot of different. You get all the stuff that I've been talking about in these lives in a very concise manner. Right. Whereas here I'm going off script and I just keep on talking. I like it because it's fun. Okay. And let me know if you have any more questions so that I can give you more information. That's good. Okay. Especially at this time where you are stuck inside of home. You know, you're stuck at home and you don't know what to do. You know, your best bet is actually to ask someone. So it might not be me, but, you know, it doesn't matter as long as you are taking the time to actually ask people what's going on and how to do things. Any opinion should be like, should be accepted. And, you know, you should try out before you make a decision about whether it's good for a child or not. All right, obviously, stay safe, everyone. I hope that you have a great day. I don't know where you're watching this. Maybe it's a good night for you. And if you're watching this on a recording, you can still comment any questions or tell me what's going on at home. And if you really need to, if you really need to, you can email me@mingagentsofspeech.com so that we can have a more private conversation if you don't want other people to see it. All right, so with that said, thank you so much for tuning in. I will be live again on Friday. The schedule right now is Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 9am from where I am, I'm in Jakarta, Indonesia. So an EST Eastern Standard Time, the USA one, that would be 10am, 10pm I bet that'd be EST, 10pm so that's more like an international standard of talking about time. And I really hope that everyone is doing the part with the pandemic. We are thinking about opening our clinic slowly, but we have a lot of concerns. Right. So if you're a parent and one of my clients who is looking to come to us in the near future, we're welcoming it. But to be honest, I am also very concerned about the health situation. So we're gonna open it slowly in a structured way and the safest way that is humanly Possible. And I hope that everyone does their part in this crazy, crazy, crazy times. And someone said, outside of the topic, if you were a thousand years old, let's say that you were like. You were like a tree, right? You're a thousand years old. You would have gone through four pandemics, and this is the fourth one. But we never had a pandemic that was global. You know, like, we're talking to parents who are from New York, you know, who are from. Who are from Australia, parents who are talking to me from all over the world who are by itself, like, very, very. How to say, it's crazy that I'm talking to parents all over the world about something that I do for a living, you know, and then to top up on that, our situations are the same. You know, we're all stuck at home. We're all trying our best to, like, navigate this pandemic and trying to social distance. And all of the parents around the world with a delayed child is facing the same issue. They cannot bring them to a therapy center. They're not able to go to school. And they're doing the bulk of the school work at home, which is crazy without a better word. It's just crazy that everyone is following the same fate. Someone from India is having the same issues at home as someone who was in Australia. And someone in Indonesia is, like, asking me the same question as someone who just asked me yesterday in America, which is fascinating. So this is why I'm making these lives so that you can ask me specifically. Because. Because there must be someone around the world who is actually telling me I lost my train of thought. Yeah. So that's why you should tell me what you want me to talk about. Because there's someone in the world who must benefit from it. There must be someone who's going through the same thing as you are, especially now. Right? So, Nabil, thank you for telling me. My kid likes social interaction. Okay, cool. So I'll talk about that in a bit as well. And Zavana says thanks bunches. Main Lin's here. We're watching together. Oh, cool. Hi, Lena. Yeah, thanks for watching, guys. And thanks for the people who actually watch this as a recording because, you know, I get like 10 times more people watching it as a recording for some reason, and that's cool. So put down your questions. Let me know what kind of topics you want me to talk about at live. Because I just go off. There's no script. I just keep on talking, you know, I just keep on talking about what I know. And if there's something I don't know, I'll research it. I'll find someone who knows and I'll tell you, all right? So don't worry about it. So with that said, thank you so much for tuning in. I am going off now and wish you guys all safe and sound. See ya.