PROMPT

PROMPT is an acronym for "Prompts for Reconstructing Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets".  The technique is a tactile-kinesthetic approach that utilizes touch cues to a child's articulators (jaw, lips, tongue) in order to manually guide then through a targeted sound, word, phrase, or sentence. This approach develops motor control and the development of proper oral musculature movements as well as eliminating unnecessary ones. PROMPT therapy is appropriate for a wide range of patients with communication disorders however, the most common patients present with motor speech disorders, apraxia, articulation weaknesses, and nonverbal children. 

​

Feeding Therapy

The Sequential Oral Sensory (SOS) Approach to Feeding program was developed by Dr. Kay Toomey.  

This approach focuses on increasing a child’s comfort level by exploring foods and allowing a child to interact with food in a fun, stress-free way.  Therapy focuses on increasing the variety of foods that the child eats and having them become comfortable with different textures, temperatures, color, food groups, brands, etc.

Feeding therapy will also focus on any oral motor weaknesses such as difficulty moving tongue, sucking from a straw, difficulty chewing. This is targeted typically by practicing skills on non food items and transferring skills to feeding directly following practice. 

Bottle feeding and transferring from the bottle to solids is another area of feeding treatment. 

​

Play Therapy

Play therapy focuses on building play skills in order to allow the child to acquire cognitive, language, and social emotional skills. Language goals are targeted through play as the child's play skills mature. The Westby Play Scales developed by Carol E. Wesby are used in order to target and build play skills appropriately while incorporating language targets simultaneously.

​

Social Skills Play Groups

Play groups focus on building interactive play skills so that children learn social skills such as; playing alongside other children, initiating play, joint attention during play, turn taking, using language during play, etc.

​

Hippotherapy

The American Hippotherapy Association states that "'hippotherapy' refers to how occupational therapy, physical therapy, and speech-language pathology professionals use evidence-based practice and clinical reasoning in the purposeful manipulation of equine movement to engage sensory, neuromotor, and cognitive systems to achieve functional outcomes. In conjunction with the affordances of the equine environment and other treatment strategies, hippotherapy is part of a patient's integrated plan of care."

 

Speech and language requires adequate integration of all sensory systems. If any area of the sensory system is not functioning adequately then we observe deficits in motor movement performance and speech is a complex motor task. When a child is horseback they receive input to all sensory systems aiding in the organization and integration of systems. Hippotherapy address speech and language weaknesses through facilitation of physiological and sensory systems that support speech and language functioning.