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GIVING CHILDREN A VOICE...
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The Chesapeake Speech School has created a unique, cutting edge speech and language school where speech pathologists, special education teachers and occupational therapists work together in language based classes.
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Students are taught in very small classes, usually six or fewer students, and students often will have 1:1 and 1:2 attention. By giving children intensive oral motor work daily, frequent sensory motor work and making verbal output the focus of each and every day, the Chesapeake Speech School hopes to remediate the severe language impairment that many children face.
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The school does not subscribe to any one methodology but instead uses an eclectic and ever evolving approach that integrates the best available teaching techniques and therapies, which currently includes discrete trial, Pivotal Response Training, Rapid Prompting, floortime, and PROMPT
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The cornerstone of the Chesapeake Speech School is a proven structured language program called the Association Method. The method was developed by Mildred McGinnis, who taught at the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, MO. It is a phonics based, multi-sensory systematic program for teaching oral and written communication to children with severe communication disorders.
The Association Method is implemented in an incremental and systematic manner. Instruction progresses from the teaching of individual sounds to syllables, to words of gradually increasing length, to basic sentences and questions, and eventually to more advanced sentence structures and corresponding questions. After mastery at the sentence level, the student learns how to order sentences in sequence to develop stories of increasing complexity.
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The teaching procedures are specifically designed to reduce the language disordered child’s difficulties in decoding, organizing, associating, storing and retrieving language and replicates the natural way in which children develop language.
The Association Method has been used successfully to teach speech and language to children with severe apraxia. It has also been used successfully with children with mixed receptive/expressive language disorders, autism/PDD, aphasia, articulation disorders, dyslexia, head injuries, central auditory processing disorders, and profound hearing impairment.
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