Will Oral Motor Exercises Help in Speech Clarity Speech Therapist Answers Parent Questions

Hello, this is Ming from agentsofspeech.com I'm a speech therapist. Today I'm going to answer some questions from our community. I see a lot of comments in our YouTube videos. You can go to www.agentsofspeech.com course. Okay, you can go there and check it out. The alternative link is school.comaosAOS for agents of speech. Okay, so here we're going to go through some questions and you can see the questions right here. Okay. My child is imitating words but lacks clarity. Would any oral motor exercises help in speech clarity? So we've gone through this in a previous video before. I just want to sit down and talk to you candidly about oral motor exercises. So aural motor exercise, it works in two ways. Number one is that if your child has any type of weakness, coordination issue that makes speech sounds hard to produce, we would do oral motor exercises. And the other part is if your child doesn't truly understand where the placement of the articulators would go, like articulators are the jaw, lip and tongue, then we would also do some oral motor exercises as a step down. So for instance, if you cannot dunk a basketball, I always use this analogy. If you can't do that, what would we do? We would start doing squats. So squats is like motor exercise to help achieve the desired outcome and it's a step down toward. So about the clarity, it depends on what clarity there are. You cannot just go ahead and do a auto motor exercise hoping that it will help with speech clarity. It needs to be brought forward. It needs to be brought towards the goal in order for it to work. What do I mean by that? Is that yeah, you can exercise all you want, it will improve your overall health. But if your goal is to dunk a basketball, there isn't much of a point to do a lot of sit ups. All right, so the oral motor needs to be targeted towards what sounds are lacking. So in this time, sweetheart, you have to think about what sounds are missing, right? And you need to do articulation test, whether it's with a speech therapist, hopefully with a speech therapist. And then you will have a list of different speech sounds that are lacking. And then you can go ahead and target each of those speech sounds with like what we call stimulability test, where we stimulate those sounds if they're stimulable, meaning can I use cues and prompts to create that speech sound to come out? So a lot of times we teach, let's say the f Sound like, right? And because the F is always either replaced or deleted, it reduces the clarity. What we call speech intelligibility. That's a mouthful said five times. A lot of times what happens is that parents will go ahead and start doing like oral motor exercises, massages and stuff. But an F, you have to make sure if your child can actually do an F sound, there's no point in massaging and doing whatever if you're not stimulating that. And there's a lot of ways to stimulate. We have a full course on it. It's called Speech disorder crash course, which is for free on our community. Again, go there ww school.comaos you need to know if it's stimulable first. And then you need to do a deep test, meaning, like from. Let's say from a. Just a phonemic level, meaning just isolated. If they can do like that, that's the isolated level. Can they even do that? Okay, if they cannot, then we will go down one level and do some like, oral motor exercises, let's say, mimic the. The. The production of the absence. Okay. Anyways, lots of fur here. Give me a second. And then a deep test means like along, like from isolation level all the way to like sentence level and a linguistic type of situation. Where does the breakdown. So a lot of these terms and stuff I use here are gonna not make a lot of sense to you. And this because you need to go through the courses we have inside of the community. All right? They're all free, so go ahead and go Watch that. So, sweeta, hopefully I've answered your question. Don't do automotive for automotive sake. Do oramoto to target a certain speech sound that is lacking. Okay, and then we have Kiran, which he says, my son is aged four and a half. He has understanding command following pointing, but speech is not improving. When we tell him to say, he says, ma go. But he's not joining letters to get meaningful word. Mango. Okay, so he's at letter stages now. He's not joining letters. Please suggest. Okay, so we have a full video breaking that down on our community, and it's inside of our micro course. And as you can see, a lot of these questions were asked before we asked, answered them before, and that's why we made those courses free. We used to sell it. But then a lot of parents, they don't have credit cards in developing countries. So this is us giving back or trying to. Okay, so like for instance, Flamingo, right? So you can just. Verbal cue can only go so far. If you watch the micro course. If you go ahead and talk about a syllabic joining, you cannot just use a verbal cue. Because if I say mango and then the kid probably just repeats the last syllable of the word or the first usually. So if you say mango, it says go and he's like this wrong, say meh and goes go. Because by you saying mang, it's already cueing the next syllable. So it's not going to work if you understand what I'm trying to say. It's always going to go in circles and then you say and then take a man and then you say go. So you need a visual representation. Usually we use fingers for me, because I just use whatever is around me. So we go like man go. And then we take the hands and go manga go. And we do it over and over again until he understands the joining of syllables. All right, that's what I would suggest for Kiran here. Next question is from Sadia. She asked. My six year old autistic son was potty trained since the age of four. He has recently started wetting himself multiple times during the day. What can I do? All urine tests are fine. So Sadia go through our potty training workshop, which is also free inside of the community. All right, search for it in the classroom tab. It's right there. Anyways, Darina asks, hi, I have a potty training question as well. When I leave my child with no diaper or pants, he just goes every time, doesn't tell me, doesn't ask. 100% success rate. Okay. He comes afterwards most of the time and tells me great job. Meaning he did a great job in the moment. I put pants or diaper, he never goes to the potty. I try to do any intervals and give him to watch TV on the party. He stays and watches, but most of the time he doesn't go. What do I suggest? What does Ming suggest? So Dariena had obviously gone through some of our potty training inside of the community. So I'll answer this by troubleshooting. So right now if there's no diaper or pants, he just goes, which is great. Meaning he's like butt naked. Right? And whenever she put the pants or diaper, he'll never go to the party. So we have to think about what is the breakdown in terms of this behavior. So we can try to put only a pant, only the pants, only underwear, only a diaper. Can we use something that's relatively thinner in terms of. Or you could use a. A very thin diaper, a very thin paper Underwear, so to speak, like that. What we usually do is that if you follow inside of the potty training program is that if we don't put on the pants, we don't put it on a hundred percent and we put it like just at the feet, right? That means that it's sitting on the potty and then the underwear is already taken off and at their, at their foot level whilst it's sitting. Like how we go to do number two nowadays is like we take off our pants and then the pants are on the floor alongside our feet. So we need to make sure that he understands that. And then as he's getting more success going to the potty that way, then what we do is like we slowly pull up until it's on. So the behavior want to train here is the taking off of the pants until for him to understand the sensory input of having the pants on, it still means that he needs to go to the potty. Okay, So I want you to try the arena is to put your child on the potty, give him some water, have the pants or the diapers at the, at the bottom of the foot while he's like sitting, right? And start off with like really thin diapers or pants for that matter. And slowly pull that up until like you're still with him and he's still peeing. And the biggest problem here is that he goes himself when he's butt naked. So what you want to do is to teach him to slowly understand that sensory of having that diapers on his foot and slowly pull up. And then you need to have a time during the day where you're sitting at the party with him, just giving him water beforehand and having him have a lot of great job moments as you were saying. Okay, we need a follow up on this so maybe you can ask more questions in the community. Mei says. Hi Ming. Can I teach my son to properly spit when tooth brushing? He simply eat the tooth gel and start brushing teeth. I tried many times how to spit and change the flavor to no sugar. My son is 3 years old with ASD. My avid follower AOS. Okay, cool. I would say. And there's actually a parent who told about what to do. I'll read it here. So Adriana answered. She's not Ming obviously, but she used to brush my teeth in front of him and make faces, make a lot of foam, exaggerate gestures, make it silly, funny voices when spitting out. Then you give him his toothbrush and do the same and put a big smile when it's time to Spit the toothpaste, you'll find it funny and try to imitate it. It goes super messy in the beginning, but you probably have to change his shirt after that. But with time he will master it. So I also think that's a good recommendation. And what I'd say is like how about you try teaching him how to, how to, how to spit first. So do something that's funny. Encourages him to spit water out. So this might backfire because he might spit water out every time when you guys are like drinking or whatever. But I would say that it's, it makes sense to allow him to understand what does spit mean. So it might be that you are playing a game where he's supposed to spit water into, into something or to knock something down. So you have water in your mouth and go like that and it knocks figurine down in the toilet or something. Just do this all in the toilet so that the chance of him transferring it to real life is a little lower. But at the same time you're taking some risks here. So after, when your child understands that you can slowly move back into tooth brushing. So that's what I would say first. The next question is from Stephanie. She asked. My three month old daughter does not imitate words. She says Babi, Mama, Papa, Baba and speaks strong at mixing all she can say. How do I teach her imitate, say a word. Sometimes she is interested, sometimes she's not. Feel like she chooses what to say and pronounce everything we do and what she's interested in. So this is our bread and butter at agents of speech. So I would say at the very beginning, go watch the micro course inside of our community. First that's free. And then the second thing is when you want her to imitate something, you need to have something she wants. It might be a toy, it might be an activity, it might be a snack, a reward, screen time, whichever. Right now we don't know if like Babi Baby, Mama, Papa and the jargons are her true ability. We don't know. And as you were saying, she's sometimes interested, sometimes she's not. So. And she chooses what to say. So just use a reward. Just dangle a carrot in front of your child and get those going. And if she doesn't imitate, then go down one step and try doing some action imitation stuff. That's what we always talk about. We can do gestures, we can teach action so we can do a touch head, these things. And at the end of the day if you need more help, you can Always join our our paid group coaching, which we have a group coaching program called Talk to Me that addresses the issue about going from like non verbal to verb. The next question is from Alina. She asked, My 2 year old is making sounds and seems like he's trying to talk but keeps his mouth closed when he's doing it. So I can't tell if he's really imitating my words or just making sounds. Again, Molina, use a reward. You use a reward and it still doesn't work. Then the best idea is to go down one level and try some mouse shapes. Right. If you have a reward dangling in front of him and he knows that he's supposed to imitate anything that you do, then it would make sense for you to try and do some mouth shapes like, like open mouth, spread lips, puck lips like that, just to see if he truly understands imitation. So the problem now is that you're not sure if he's truly imitating your words. You don't know his true ability. So I would go ahead and use rewards to see how far he can go. If you're not sure, then go down to a level that you're sure. It could be mouse shapes, it could be vowel sound, it could be funny sound like wow, wow. These ones are also fine. Okay, next is Next question is from Ayla. So she asks how do you teach comprehension and analytical thinking? My seven year old talks, reads, adds, subtracts, writes. But has problems when it comes to more complex sentences like explaining something, describing. Okay. Retelling what happened, answering how and why question or what comes next. He has problem expressing himself verbally. Okay. And find words that he wants to say. Has problem with times like yesterday. Today is fine, but last week, last month, two days ago is difficult. Sometimes starts talking as the listener already knows what he's talking about. No context given. Okay. I've been printing out worksheets. He reads short paragraph and answer follow up questions. I get him to play guessing games. Okay. Refill pages of storybooks every night and ask questions about the story. Okay. And she's watched the Verbal reasoning crash course, which is inside of our community. Although I don't use why because Vashcast did his fire story. It was helpful. Okay. So I would say for you, Ayla, I would say at this point in time it would be super beneficial for you to do a lot more storytelling with him. You can go ahead and have a bunch of story cards as we lay out in the Verbal Reasoning crash course that he goes through the sequence of the cards and tells you what happened? Something else is what something else. What you can do is with a, with a smartphone, videos, pictures of what happened during the day. Go through them one by one and go through the pictures. Right? What happened here? What happened here? This was two days ago. Whatever. And because there's a calendar function on your iPhone or your Android phone, whatever phone you have, it makes it easy for you to demonstrate how long ago it was and you can teach them that way. All right? And then for the context stuff, it's better if you teach with the toys that have game rules so that it's easier for him to explain something. Explaining game rules is a key thing that we do in speech therapy. By giving him like a context in front of him, he doesn't have to explain the context too much because it's already given inside of the game rules. So you could play a game of Uno and then he would have to answer like, why it's a match. Why you cannot put something on top. Like for instance, if some red two and you put like a yellow three and then that, and then you say that's wrong. And then you can say, why? Because you're only supposed to put the same color or the same numbers. This is neither. Right. So you cannot. It's illegal. And you have to take a card. So you need to have those games go through the verbal reasoning workshop and look at how we talk about using toys to help him with the why questions. So for your 70 year old, I would say do more storytelling with cards instead of storybooks and also use like the iPhone, like your phone to take pictures and retell experience. And then the second thing is play more games where he has to answer why questions. All right, the last question we have here is Sahar. So she asks. Thank you. My son is four and three months. He speaks in full sentences. I noticed that he sometimes skips the verb in a sentence for some reason. I would greatly appreciate your advice. Okay, cool. So the verb is missing. And usually the reason why is because the verb is lacking. A lot of times children who are speech and language delayed, they don't have a very well balanced vocabulary. So they have a lot of nouns, adjectives. They don't have a lot of verbs. When you tell me that, it means that you have to strengthen his verbs first before trying to help. A lot of times in these verbs, in a sentence, you can use gestures to cue them, to say those, to fill it in. So it can also be a type of feedback. So whenever he skips it, you emphasize the verb that was missing. With the gesture. Let's say he says he saw someone running on the football field. Or someone I saw a boy running on a football field. And he would say, I saw boy, football field. And then he said, oh, you saw a boy running on a football field. Running. That's the verb, right? Running. That's what he was doing. And you don't have to make him to say it again. And what you want to do is you want to have. The verbs are quite tricky because if you come show them in a still image, right, in a static image, it doesn't convey 100% of what the verb is about. But instead, if you do a lot more gestures and you show them video, that actually helps a lot. What I would say in this case is like, whenever he speaks the full sentence and he skips it, give a feedback about the verb that he's using and add a gesture and emphasize it. Okay? All right, so if you like this format, let me know in the comments below. And if you want to ask us questions, you can go to www.agentsofspeech.com course, alternatively, you can just go to the community link, which is www.school.comaos. right. Other links will work and it's just easier to remember if it's on our URL. So anyways, if this is good, we will do this every week. We will gather question from our community, which is around 10,000 people as of this this recording. So if you like it, give it a thumbs up, let us know. And if you want to ask us questions again, go to the link in the description below. All right, that's all for this week's video. I'll see you in the next one. Bye bye.