Over 3 years ago I began working with Andrew who has a diagnosis of cerebral palsy. Anyone that knows Andrew will tell you that his personality and smile lights up every room that he is in. Each time I arrive for therapy I am greeted with squeals of laughter and a wave from the hardest working boy I know! While therapy has targeted both speech and feeding over the years, I want to highlight the progress he has made with his expressive communication. READ MORE

When my son, Noah, was 2 years old, his speech therapist suspected he might have apraxia of speech. Noah had no intelligible language, almost no approximations and very poor oral motor skills. He did not have the motor coordination necessary to blow a bubble or produce any sound on a horn. He had weakened muscles throughout his mouth. His therapist gave us a horn (horn #1 from the TalkTools horn hierarchy) and told us to practice with Noah every day. She also referred us to TalkTools to purchase the rest of the horn hierarchy and the chewy tube set. We practiced horn #1 every single day for three months before Noah was able to produce his first sound. The amount of pride we felt at this tangible accomplishment was indescribable! After master horn #1, he quickly mastered the others in less than a year. He found great success with the horn hierarchy. Some were harder than others (specifically horn #7), but he worked so hard to master each of them. He loved the different noises the horns made- especially the train and airplane! Each horn taught him specific ways to move his mouth to produce noises and increased his oral motor coordination. We are still using chewy tubes- he still struggles with his left side.

  

After we graduated from the horn hierarchy, his speech therapist began using the bilabial shapes and tactile tubes to help teach him perfect his sounds. He is a very visual and tactile learner, so having these physical prompts really helped him find success. The bilabial shapes actually helped teach him his second and third words when he was 3 - "momma" and "more."  Noah is now 4.5. He is still affected by his apraxia every day. But now, he has so many words. He has sentences! He is able to communicate his needs and wants. We are so grateful to TalkTools for creating these amazing products so kids like Noah can find their words. Thank you so much!

-Mary

Noah's family is active in the Tampa Bay area and is busy every year fundraising for Apraxia Walks benefiting CASANA (Childhood Apraxia of Speech Association of North America).

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In celebration of 30 years of successful therapy, we asked you to share your success stories with us at the last ASHA Convention and the response was amazing! Here is Diane Felton’s inspiring testimonial.

“I’m Diane Felton. I’m a speech therapist in Durham, North Carolina. I first met Sara through a patient who was referred to me because the local therapist who has been seeing him said she did not believe in oral motor therapy. So I was fortunate enough to pick him up, and when I was asked about taking him on, I decided to look into TalkTools, and everything that I saw in the program made sense to me. So I agreed to take him on and was fortunate enough to have Sara as a co-treator really throughout the whole process of treating this patient. He was a seventeen-year-old who has been in a car accident, suffered a traumatic brain injury and was non-verbal. He was able to type using a communication typewriter kind of thing that he called “typer,” but he had no speech other than one word which is “ma.” He had been in therapy for two and a half years at that point, which was what caused his mom to kind of go out and look for something else, something she felt like he wasn’t getting in the therapy. She was frustrated and he was frustrated.

“They started the program with Sara and worked at home for six months just on building his strength. He couldn’t blow out a candle, he had really severe verbal apraxia ... so a lot of the initial steps focused on getting his strength back for speech, then later he started working on the apraxia piece which is kind of where I came in and worked with Sara’s guidance on getting him some sounds. It has been seven years since I started seeing this patient and he is completely verbal. He gave up his communication device about two years ago and he is doing great. We are still working on prosody, that’s the main thing that is keeping him from being a pretty normal speaker, he is also a little bit slow still, but he is intelligible to me almost 100% of the time. Occasionally I need him to clarify, but even unfamiliar listeners understand him most of the time. It was a really great experience working with Sara and getting to know this program.

“I have had other patients who have had great success. I saw a three-year-old who was focused on communication devices because she had no speech and basically everyone had decided that she was not going to talk. She had a diagnosis of autism, she was also a twenty-four week premie, one of triplets, and she had no speech. I used the TalkTools program with her and she had a very hard time getting the oral motor planning down, but TalkTools really helped her. It was about a month for her to get the word “up” and her mom asked if every word was going to take that long, but within three months she had a pretty good vocabulary, and a year later she was pretty much completely verbal and only was really working on speeding up her rate of speech which is still slow but she has done great.

“I have had lots of other patients who have done exceedingly well. Sara coming into my life was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. I have loved the TalkTools program. I have been just so thrilled to be able to help people who come sort of as their last ditch effort and just kind of not sure if they should continue to even try, and TalkTools program has worked for them. So thank you Sara.” ~ Diane Felton, MA, CCC-SLP

We are incredibly appreciative of those who shared their stories, let us know if you have a story to tell.