At the beginning of each month children receiving Speech Therapy, Occupational Therapy, or Physical Therapy at Memorial Medical Center are invited to choose a book to read with their therapists and then take home with them to share with their families. Therapists let the children pick a book, they then incorporate it into their therapy session, says Kristine Elliott, Program Manager of Memorial's Outpatient Pediatric Therapy Department.
Communication is important in all therapy, but especially speech therapy.
You are working not only with the spoken language but understanding and listening. Just listening to a story helps children expand their vocabulary and their sentence structures. Therapists can also see how children retain information and use the experience for memory building skills. Children in Memorial's Outpatient Therapy Department come for a variety of reasons including speech, language or feeding disorders, physical, sensory or cognitive problems, acute injuries and developmental delays. Many children are enrolled in Memorial's Regional Intensive Care Nursery follow-up clinic which monitors children who were born early or with special needs.