Let’s Start Talking

Your child may be a good candidate for one of three programs, including Let’s Start Talking™, Let’s Talk More™, or Let’s Talk Clearly™.  These are programs developed by Dr. Megan Hodge at the University of Alberta.  Since 2014, Lisa Kohel, R. SLP has completed on-going training and mentoring to complete the requirements to deliver these programs. 

Did you know? An Intensive Services treatment block through Totally Talking is carefully tailored to meet the specific and individualized needs of your child with suspected or confirmed Childhood Apraxia of Speech. 

This means we focus on developing speech accuracy, language skills, and may incorporate literacy skill development (depending on needs and goals).  By working collaboratively with families, a program plan can be created to meet a variety of needs to improve communication skills.   

As someone trained in Let’s Start Talking, Let’s Talk More, and Let’s Talk Clearly, in addition to completing Apraxia Kids Bootcamp Training (2021), Totally Talking is able to offer a variety of programming options to help meet the specific needs of your child. 

Intensive Services with Totally Talking

What to Expect

Intensive Services starts with an evidence-informed evaluation of your child’s needs in terms of speech and language development and includes a plan that targets areas of growth.

At the end of the treatment block, a detailed report is provided, which documents pre-post testing results as well as parent and child goals with progress updates. 

Typically, an Intensive Services plan is 12 weeks in length.  Sessions occur twice per week and are 50 minutes in length.  A parent or caregiver is typically required to attend all sessions.  General goals focus on developing skills of the child and improving a family’s capacity to help their child become better understood.

Example goals for parents may include:

• completing home practice assignments each week 

• understanding how to cue the child for successful and accurate production of the target sound, word, or phrase

• documenting changes in speech and language progress each week (recording new sounds and words heard)

• increase understanding the nature of the child’s spoken language disorder and how it may affect later written language development

Goals for the child may include:

• increasing how much others understand (within social and academic contexts)

• improving accuracy of sound productions in words, phrases, and sentences

• improving self-monitoring skills

• improving clear communication skills (including articulation, prosody and voicing) within words, word combinations, and longer utterances

• improving language skills, including spoken storytelling (narrative skills), sentence level grammar, and vocabulary knowledge

• improving written language skills (reading, writing, spelling)

Intensive Services Provided Through Totally Talking

Hear What People Are Saying

“Lisa is an expert in Childhood of Apraxia and introduced us to the Let’s Start Talking program. Lisa also prepared us that our son may experience reading delays and provided us with resources for early literacy intervention. Lisa’s support and guidance led us to make decisions for our son that he still reaps the benefits of today.

While Lisa provided direct speech therapy to our son, she also acted as a consultant to our family - helping navigate school entry, speech therapy programs, and literacy development.

Our son is now 9.5 years and thriving in school and completely intelligible. We know this is directly related to the expert early interventions he received through Lisa."

— Parent (Fall, 2021)