Do you have questions about how your child speaks or understands? Are you curious about their development or if they may need additional support?

We provide norm-referenced speech and language screenings, which will determine in 15 minutes whether or not your child may require further testing.

The Welch Practice provides comprehensive speech and language evaluations, which measure your child’s communication skills. We conduct both standardized and non-standardized evaluations, in order to reference norms and compare your child's communication skills to their same-age peers. This also helps to understand how they are using/understanding language in their daily life. Evaluations will determine whether or not your child qualifies for speech and language services.

Before the evaluation, you may be asked to answer questions about your child, in order to help us better understand them and how they communicate at home. You may be asked about their health history, developmental history, family, speech/language/social behaviors, and school history.

Once the evaluation is complete, you will receive a written report of their results, as well as goals for treatment, if warranted. Your team will review the results with you and determine next steps.

These evaluations are for individuals who are non-speaking, minimally speaking, or unreliably speaking. During these evaluations, our therapists will conduct a lesson with your child, trial various board types, and determine what modality of pointing to letters will be most effective for them. They will also spend some time teaching your family about the the format best to teach the alternative method and how you can do work at home using this method.

Individual therapy can be done both in-person at our clinic or digitally via Zoom. Individualized sessions will be designed for your child, in order to best support their goals. A variety of techniques to improve communication and/or swallowing will be used based on your child’s strengths, needs, and interests. Based on your child’s age and diagnosis, therapy may include talking and playing using books, pictures, or other objects to help stimulate language development, modeling of correct sounds, syllables, and words, open-ended discussions, and age-appropriate lessons. Strategies and homework will be provided for the child and caregivers, in order to promote carry-over into the home.

Group therapy is a wonderful opportunity for students of all ages to engage in a variety of activities with their peers. In addition to the benefit of practicing and generalizing their communication and social skills targeted in individual therapy, it can also be very beneficial for students to relate to peers who are similar to them and have similar goals.