Eli's Speech Evaluation

Well, we just finished with Eli’s speech evaluation, and I think it went quite well. They test every aspect of the child’s development, not just the speech. And they said that he was doing extremely well with those parts of the tests. I guess they always test to see how well a child can do things, even above the child’s age level. So, the psychologist and the speech therapist said they were very impressed because they’ve never seen a child his age be able to do certain things – like the psychologist showed Eli a picture and asked: ‘An egg is to a chicken as an acorn is to a ___?’ And Eli answered tree correctly. And she had these little blocks with different shapes on each face of the blocks and she asked him to use the blocks to form the designs that she showed him in different pictures. She told me that most kids can’t do very many of those, and Eli got up past the level of a 13-year-old.

But I hadn’t had any concerns about any of his development other than his speech. They tested his speech, and confirmed that he does have a lisp. The speech therapist told me that it was interesting, because lots of kids with lisps replace an ‘S’ sound with a ‘Th’ sound, but Eli not only does that, but also replaces a ‘T’ sound with a ‘Th’ sound – she said she’d never heard a child do that specific sound replacement before. (She was telling me that they recently visited a little girl who was also very bright and had a lisp with just the ‘Th’ sound replacing the ‘S’ sound, and that they decided not to do any speech therapy for her – so I guess Eli is just on the very edge of needing a little extra help). And I know that he can make an ‘S’ sound, because he sometimes replaces other consonants with an ‘S’ sound, even when there’s not an ‘S’ in the word. I guess that they add up all the scores on their tests and they have to have above a certain score in order for the child to qualify for speech therapy. And she told me that Eli qualified on the pronunciation part of the test, but they have to qualify on at least two parts of the test, and since he didn’t qualify on any of the non-speech parts of the test, she averaged his score down a little bit on the language section in order for him to qualify. She said that because some of the time she could understand him well and other times she had a hard time understanding him, she thought he would really benefit from speech therapy. She told me that we would get the reports in the mail and would probably start therapy after the school Christmas break in January. She said that someone will come to our house twice a week, and that she thought he would be done with the therapy relatively quickly (which I assumed meant a month or maybe two, until she said she thought he’d almost be done with therapy when he starts kindergarten next fall). So, I’m glad that they are going to work with him on this, and I’m glad that it will be at our house and that the school districts cover the cost – I really don’t mind the high taxes here in NYS because you can really see where the tax money is being spent for the people in the communities, especially for the children.