Spontaneous Speech

Yesterday morning, Dominic said two sentences spontaneously.  When he came downstairs for breakfast, he told me, "It's snowing!"

Then, shortly before he got on the bus, he looked out the back window, saw a bunny hiding behind one of the trees in the backyard and said, "bunny in the snow!"

 

That might not seem like a huge deal, but to me, I was ready to have a party!  For children with speech delays (like Dominic), getting him to describe what's going on and initiating conversation is a constant challenge.  At his parent/teacher conference in March, I talked briefly to Dominic's current speech therapist. He has been blessed to have had some amazing speech therapists that have worked with him since he started school. The speech therapist filled me in on how he was doing at the conference.  She gave me some great suggestions on how to elicit more spontaneous speech, like cover the words in a story and make him describe the picture or get him to identify features such as what a character has or is doing.  Dominic also has been working on using verbs correctly. When he said, "it's snowing" it was awesome because he could have said, "snow" or "snow outside." I was super duper proud of him!! This morning while Dominic was getting ready for school, he spontaneously said, "Hi, Mommy, blow a kiss!"  Does it get any better than that?!?!?!