Top Tips – SEMH and behavioural strategies

Supporting students with SEMH (Social Emotional and Mental Health) difficulties can be very challenging for us as therapists, including parents and teachers alike, as none us are mental health practitioners! In addition to this, access to... Read more

October: AAC Awareness Month!

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) Awareness Month is upon us! AAC is all about providing strategies and communication aids that add to or replace spoken communication – it isn’t limited to just speech after all! We at... Read more

Is an Atypical Cry an Early Biomarker for Autism?

At about the same age all typically developing children, no matter what culture they are born into, manifest similar patterns of speech and language acquisition. In autism, however, there is no clear and rigid pattern during the first year... Read more

Are early motor delays and sensory differences clues to atypical language/ communication development in ASD?

Impairments of social communication are seen as one of the essential diagnostic features of autism. However, they cannot be considered as primary characteristics because all the ‘communication symptoms’ appear later in life. For... Read more

Autism: Selecting Communication Systems

To communicate successfully children have to have a communication tool. We should introduce them to the systems of communication as soon as possible. The selection of a particular communication system should be based on the child’s... Read more

Motherhood – The pressure to be perfect

Each month, I scour online journals and news articles looking for inspiration for something to share in this blog. This month I did not have far to look for inspiration. One of the most wonderful aspects of being a speech and language... Read more

Sex Education and Learning Difficulties

What will you be doing on the 14th February?  Will Cupid be visiting you? Will you send someone a Valentine’s card, get given red roses, or go out for a romantic meal?  With all things love in the air around February, I thought I... Read more

Downs syndrome from a communication perspective

I was doing some preparation for an activity the other day and looking at news articles for research. I came across an article about a young girl with Down Syndrome (DS) who was in the news because she had recently starred in an... Read more

Sign language vs. mime-signing (for ‘kinaesthetic-speaking’ children)

Although sign languages were first developed as a means of communication for the deaf (e.g., British Sign Language – BSL), they have been also used to teach people with developmental disabilities communication skills. However, it is... Read more

Communication via objects

For visualisers who don’t understand symbols, pictures or signs, the closest to their native language would be a concrete, visible, spatial external language: a language of objects. The advantage of this mode of communication is that... Read more