Homeschooler Speech Therapy Goldmine!

Jace has moderate to moderately-severe sensory-neuro hearing loss in both ears, and wasn't diagnosed until he was 4, so he has only had his hearing aids for about a year and a half. His speech and language were delayed (about a year behind) when we started speech and language therapy at the local hospital on a grant from their charitable foundation.

Jace has made huge advances in his speech and language since then, but we knew from the start that we had a very limited number of visits, after which our insurance will not cover his therapy. Because of this limitation, the pathologist has worked with me, spacing out his sessions to every 2 weeks and giving me lots of instruction and homework to practice with Jace to get the most bang for our buck.

We're over half way through with our free sessions, and while Jace has made awesome progress, he still needs a lot of fine-tuning and there are some sounds we haven't gotten to yet. He started out omitting a lot of sounds and substituting for many of the sounds he did attempt to say. I sit in on all of his therapy sessions and we practice at home, daily. I feel confident that we will be able to continue at home with no problem once his sessions are used up at the hospital. He's a smart kid and he wants to do well with his speech.

I woke up, again, at about 4:50 am today and couldn't get back to sleep because of the congestion from this endless cold. I had something in my inbox from The Old Schoolhouse magazine that was about speech and language therapy options for homeschoolers. This got me started on one of my Google bunny trails, and I happened upon a web site that is just FULL of resources!

If you are looking for home speech and language therapy resources, free on the web, you have to check this site out. Be warned: there are a ton of links to sift through, but I have found some incredibly useful information on their list, already. I haven't even scratched the surface.

This one is really helpful for training specific sounds:
http://speech-language-therapy.com/tx-facts-and-tricks.html
This looks promising, some useful ideas:
http://www.speechpathology.com/schoolBased/toolTips.asp
And some more freebies:
http://www.speech-language-therapy.com/freebies.htm
Another site with some creative ideas for building speech:
http://www.speechtx.com/language.htm

I'm so happy to have found this goldmine of resources! Praise God! I felt confident enough about continuing before, but now I feel equipped for the job. I found a worksheet for eliciting the "ch" sound, which is awesome because as of yet, Jace has always used "sh" instead. I can't wait to try it out with him! They explained that "ch" is basically "t" plus "sh" so you can sometimes get a kid to say it by putting a word ending in "t" before a word starting with "sh" (ie wet shoes = choose) <3 the internet