Re: Re: Chorus (Desi)/Speech/Value of Music

[Guest guest]

Oh Janice...After reading your email, I was compelled to watch my daughter Aubrey on You Tube (see link below) from a clinical perspective to answer your question...Here's a long reply. Hope it helps...

wish you could see Aubrey struggle with the need to stim, spin, self-talk etc every minute of every day-as you would realize the true miracle of what she's doing on this stage. Three minutes of absolute focus! That is the extreme value of the structure of music. As you know as a veteran parent, for most of our kids, their auditory processing is not as strong as the visual so this accomplishment is huge. Music can be a VERY POWERFUL motivator as you know especially as they get older because it is something they have in common with their peers. She is in beginning band for the second year playing the bass drum, albeit too loud sometimes

because of her hearing and OT issues, but she's performed and done well on stage there, too. Aubrey always "breaks the floor" at their school dances and her typical classmates dance with her!Aubrey choreographs her signing for the songs she chooses and practices willingly as she LOVES being on stage as you can see. Performing is a HUGE motivator for her! I don't know if it is the applause or just being able to participate as meaningfully in our shows as her big sister can? And of course, the connection she must somehow feel to others' souls in her audiences through her music-well, I don't think our world quite understands that level of communication yet... :)Please note that Aubrey's hearing has improved a bit and she is mildy hearing impaired now, but her speech is still very poor despite 4X20min speech in school for years and having a Mommy who worked with her on her articulation constantly in hundreds of creative ways. Parents should resist what the schools often try to tell us in middle school and high school that "speech skills will plateau" (that's a dirty word at my daughter's IEP Table-I DESPISE that word!) because Aubrey's speech CONTINUES TO IMPROVE, albeit slowly.Aubrey communicates by trying to speak first, if not understood (she is in a hearing impaired SPED class with a lot of inclusion pull-outs) signs second and now is getting pretty proficient on an itouch/Proloquo2go communication device. I am thankful that she has so many options so that she can have her own "voice" but I will never stop advocating for her school team to continue working toward improving her ability to speak-as this will make it easier for her to make her way in the world. What is curious is that others often understand what she is saying better than I can! What?!If you watch Aubrey carefully in this recent video, compared to those when she was younger, you will see that she is syncing her "singing" and signing better and better. Aub isn't on mic but if you listen carefully, you can hear her "singing" an octave lower than she should be. Even her speaking voice is deepening as she gets older. She sounds more like a male adolescent when she speaks.Every once in a while when we sing, she is able to produce decent pitch, but it is rare. Not giving up on that either!!Every child on the spectrum is so different. Each

of our children have their own strengths. And this applies to teachers, speech therapists as well. Aubrey had a wonderful relationship with her elementary speech therapist and she would work so hard for her so we saw a lot of improvement there. Aubrey's relationship with her middle school speech therapist is lukewarm at best and all of a sudden Aubrey started putting up huge resistance to her. Aubrey would lick the mirror so ST took the mirror out of her sessions which is CRAZY! (I found that out by observing session in school.) I advocated for more behavioral support in their sessions especially trying different techniques to motivate her, but truly I had to do damage control at home and rebuild her self-esteem by finding consonant sounds ie "m" that she was able to produce successfully (we are working a lot on word ending sounds like Mo"M") and praising her like crazy. Now she's going around all over the place emphasizing the END CONSONANTS of her

words for attention. Whatever works baby! :)If anything I've learned over the last several years, it comes down to the PEOPLE who are working with your youngster and how passionate and motivated they are to help our children achieve their best. Aubrey has a brand new SPED teacher and she has done MORE in her class in four months this year, than she did all of last year with her highly experienced, burnt out one. But I also believe that WE as parents don't give ourselves enough credit in what WE CAN DO to help our child learn.Maybe start with music therapy. Observe the teacher first. You know what will work with your child after all these years. I would open my door to any student who wanted to try and there are others out there-albeit probably rare, but don't give up looking if he is that highly motivated by music. It's tailoring the program to the student needs, too and that takes time. I could care less that Aubrey sings off-pitch if it is going to help her be more motivated to pronounce words. She also learns lyrics really fast and though I can't understand half of what she "sings" because of her signing I know she understands the words. It's all inter-related anyway and if music helps her "connect" more to her world, I'm all for it in any form!Here in our state, Hawai'i, there is a music therapy program that receives grants periodically that helps them offer programs like this to children with special needs at drastically reduced rates. If you have an ISP, there are "creative ways" to work music therapy into your son's program.Please feel free to email me off-list anytime! https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hawaii-Youth-Chorus/179130878827635 Have a musical day!"Ms. Desi!" To: Sent: Thursday, February 2, 2012 6:41 AM Subject: Re: Chorus (Desi)

Desi,My son is functionally non-verbal and mostly non-verbal as well. He has severe apraxia. He has trouble producing vocal sounds. He also has poor receptive language skills. But he loves music and loves to sing. No, he's not good at it (frankly, he is nothing short of really awful), but, still, he is so much more capable of vocalizing while singing then while speaking. He actually sang/signed You Are My Sunshine in an adaptive musical theater show last spring. No way in his entire 18 years has he produced that long a string of vocalization while talking. Mostly with words, he is capable of producing vocalization of only part of a word, with the exception of a few highly motivating and often repeated mulch-syllable words/phrases like happy birthday, Hawaii, Dubai, Halloween, Japanese, Chinese, Barney, Curious , sushi, and a few people's names. Sometimes I wonder if a voice teacher could help him more than a speech pathologist.

Since he has trouble understanding directions, I'm thinking that voice lessons would probably be pointless, but I still wonder. I wonder if he would be inspired to imitate a voice teacher and if he would be capable of grasping more of the subtleties of vocalization when singing was involved (partly because of motivation) than he is when only speaking is (as in speech therapy). He is essentially clueless when it comes to the fact that he is even receiving instruction on speech production. I have no doubt that music therapy would be great for him, but voice lessons is a different matter. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on this. Are voice lessons even an option in a case like this?Janice