What I do know is that CAS is difficult to treat. It's labor intensive and time consuming. In my opinion, CAS is more stressful to treat than any other diagnosis under the SLP's broad umbrella of services. Luckily, we have a lot of colleagues out there who have broken down the proverbial doors. I would encourage you to check out Testy Yet Trying where Amy Ellsworth, a fellow SLP and mother, chronicles her journey with CAS. She also sells treatment card sets and worksheets. I've learned a lot from her blog. (I've listed some links for more information, resources and materials at the bottom of this posting.)
My biggest challenge with CAS treatment has come in the form of finding and funding appropriate materials for my students. There are many great products out there, but they are very expensive and often they do not meet the exact need of my students at the time I need to treat them. Some may be too advanced or contain words that aren't useful. So, like we do, I began to create some CAS materials of my own.
We know that students with CAS struggle in their attempts to repeat syllables and have inconsistent errors with consonant and vowel sounds. We also know that many of them tend to have trouble with prosody. We also know that kids love to talk about animals and vehicles, and this is where I got my inspiration for Sound Books.
These books are designed for you to be able to edit the text to suit your students’ capabilities. If your student isn't able to produce “Moo!” for the cow noise, but is able to produce “MMM!” then edit the text to reflect his level of production and work toward a higher level.
You can use the file in a number of ways to target a variety of treatment goals.
- Target vocabulary
- Print as cards and match animals to sounds or sounds to animals
- Have articulation students give the animal a name with their speech sounds and then tell a story about them
- Add prosody and intonation aspects to the sounds on the cards for students with CAS
More Resources and Information:
TestyYetTrying
MommySpeechTherapy
SpeechRoomNews - Apraxia Search
Linguisystems - Apraxia Materials
SuperDuper
Kaufman Speech Praxis Materials
Gildersleeve-Neumann, C. (2007, November 06). Treatment for Childhood Apraxia of Speech : A Description of Integral Stimulation and Motor Learning. The ASHA Leader.
Hi...thanks for stopping by my blog. I just went to your blog from the link in your comment and your Facebook icon works fine when I click on it…went right to your Facebook page. Not sure if it just took time to show up.
ReplyDeleteI also wanted to stop by here, because I wasn't sure if you knew that your blog comments are set to "No Reply". This means there isn't an email address attached to your blog account and there isn't a way for anyone to respond back to your comment through email. If you ever want to change that, there is a tutorial on my right side bar labeled "Are you a no reply".
Thanks again for commenting on my blog and have a great day,
Karen