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mg12061
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Kathleen has a real hard time forming sentences.This is something we ahve been working on.After her stroeks she lost most of what speech she had.Her speech was quite delayed before the strokes because of the down Syndrome.We had to start back at square one.She worked on sounds then small words then by last year we worked on multi syllable word.She's come a long way and is putting a lot of words together,but still has a hard time making a sentence. We've had to feed her the words to go from one word to 3-6 word sentences.I use familiar pictures to get her to come up with a longer thought and put it together.She will say a snetence out of order and when I say it back she knows it's wrong.Reading is helping her speech a lot.It helps with the correct pronunciation(sp?) and with the language to put a whole thought together.I sometimes "cue her" by holding up my fingers to count the words,if she really is struggling I help her fill in the blanks, and make her repeat it back to me.Now she holds up her own fingers and counts her words, she's sooooo proud when she gets 4-5 .I think everyone chalks it up to the Down Syndrome(word retrieval is a common problem in down syndroem) but I imagine it has a lot to do with the strokes.It seems like this is a very common problem.I read something that explained how this feels...Your brain is full of "baskets" with words and thoughts and memories.Typically you will have the same word in many baskets,like pumpkin, may be in a basket with holidays,halloween,pie,orange etc. but with Down Syndrome( and anyone with this speech problem) it may only be in one basket, say... halloween this makes it harder to "find" BUT if you can talk about it till you help them find the right basket it helps, also offering many different experiences and conversations around it it will help store it in other "baskets" for future recolection.Ihope this makes a little sense.... It helped me understand what she may be going through and help me to find the patience to help her through it. This also may be why reading helps her,it gives her a lot of"experiences" in language that she may otherwise not get.We also did some signing when she was little it helped her soooo much and was pretty easy to learn some basics.She loved it too. She actually used some right after the strokes. Mary Grace
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