Aidan Rush Speech Therapy Practice

[BQ Hero Series] When Kids Feel Like Failures or Lazy, with Seth Perler The more a child fosters their strengths and interests, the better they can work through their struggles and have a fulfilling life.

How autism shapes sibling relationships Having an autistic brother or sister can pose challenges, but it can also make children patient, empathetic and resilient.

Hi everyone. I'm going to talk about the toys in my therapy room . My clients love my therapy room because of the toys that they can find in the room. One of my favourite toys and theirs too is the "Magic Wand". I bought this toy when I was in the BARROSA VALLEY IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA. I called it the magic wand because it does look like it can perform magic HARRY POTTER style. It has sparkly bits floating in water in this plastic container. I LOVE IT. The toy motivates my clients who are using PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System) to ask for the toy thus creating loads of opportunities for requesting and commenting . I have used this toy for children with autism and for children with minimal or limited speech. Let's hope the magic wand will create its magic in giving our children the magic of speech!

Hi everyone its been a long time since I posted anything here. Let's start with an absolutely beautiful story that Yasmin wrote about my cats. Yasmin is a sweet little girl and I adore her stories. She is a very hardworking girl, loves pink and purple scarves and loves to read books. I hope you like her story too.

Instead of saying "use your words"...

“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.” Fred Roger

I have been wanting to write something about play skills for a while now, but the unimaginable information this topic has, overwhelms me and I end up dropping the idea every time. Today, While I was in a live-session on one of the online groups, a mother who listened to me, messaged me later asking “Merey betey ki therapist humesha is kay saath bus khelti hi rehtien hain. Ye bolna kaisay seekhega? (My son’s therapist is always playing with him, how will he ever learn to speak?) This question shook me a little, motivating me to put across as much as I could.

I am a Speech Language Therapist and have been working with children having special needs for 9 years. My trust in developing language through play increases with each passing year. I have targeted my language goals through play and gained results quite effectively. This, of course, doesn’t cover the cases where children need structured therapy before moving towards play skills, social and emotional development.

Importance of play skills has been studied in detail for the past 30 years where professionals found that the benefits of play are diverse and multifarious. Terms like Structured Play/Goal Directed Play took care of the myth where people believed play has no structure or goal to it. Later, when professionals started to take play as a form of therapy, then it became “Free play vs structured play”. The schools advocated for structured activities as the only way to learn as they didn’t understand the concept of free play as a valid medium of imparting knowledge.

Over the years, professionals and schools started to agree on the fact that whether free or structured, play does have an important role in forming a child’s personality and in helping them achieve their milestones. While working with kids and observing my own daughter, I questioned myself about how free is free play in the present world? Is there a pattern/structure/routine to free play too? When children are messing their hands up with paints or just squishing the sponge filled with foam or if they listen to a music and dance away, aren’t they coming up with a pattern of dance steps even when dancing freely? Aren’t they following a structure/routine at that time too? The answer is “I don’t know”. What I do know is, when my girl was 2 and was squishing the foam filled sponge, she followed a routine i.e. open the fist and close it for the foam to come out, cause and effect, open and close hands to get the desired effect. When she was splashing the paint on her hands, she wanted it a specific way, a pattern that I kept observing. In my humble opinion, the freedom in free play, is the decision that children make about choosing “what” they want to play with, followed by the routine or structure that they have observed in daily life (prototype behaviour) while playing with that particular toy, using language that was used by an adult and they memorised it.

Turn-taking, eye contact, impulse control, cause-and-effect, social emotional development, and hand-eye coordination can all be targeted within play activities. The basic understanding that we need to have is that play is a child’s dominant activity. Whether a child is neurotypical (typical brain development) or neurodiverse (atypical brain development e.g. autism) THEY LOVE TO PLAY. Sometimes, kids have limited play skills and we might have to introduce the possibilities of what all “PLAY” can be, but once the children get the feel, they would love to engage in it in some capacity i.e. solitary or interactive play.
Play can be as simple as splashing water in a tub and teaching “Splash! Splash! Splash!” or moving a toy car on the floor saying “beep, beep, beep”. You can take turns while doing these activities and establish the concept of turn-taking. You can have board games and target impulse control (waiting for their turn, accepting defeat when they lose a game etc.), play peek-a-boo to establish object permanence and predictability. You can play catch with a the ball to work on attention span, hand-eye coordination as well as name recognition along with words like “catch, ball, your turn, xyz’s turn”. All of these examples mentioned above have a structure and routine being followed but might as well be termed as free play, if children chose it for themselves in that moment. Our job, as adults, is to realize how much language, speech or targeted knowledge we can give within the play activity that the children have chosen for themselves.

The basic elements required to teach a child are Motivation and Attention, which are mostly there when a child is busy playing. If, as a therapist/teacher or caregiver, we know how to bring these two elements into our teaching routine then the children will let us enter into their world with open arms, ready to absorb all that is presented to them. Whether its language, cognition or social emotional development, play can help children achieve all the milestones because of their natural desire to explore and learn.

“Play is an innate skill in children to simplify the complexities they observe in their lives, helping them regulate their beautiful minds and unfold the channels for learning” – Saamia Bilal Khan

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Striatum, the brain’s reward hub, may drive core autism traits | Spectrum | Autism Research News Associated primarily with its role in movement, the striatum may also influence the social difficulties of autistic people.

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