Addressing Childhood Apraxia: The Nancy Kaufman Approach

Valeri worked with N.B., a kindergarten student, that has childhood apraxia. The twenty-minute session took place in the speech room because N.B. is easily distracted when the sessions are in her classroom. During their session, Valeri used the Nancy Kaufman Approach (K-SLP) program cards and Connect Four game to work on producing each sound together. N.B. can say most of those sounds in isolation, but has difficulty when putting the sounds together. The focus was working on consonant-vowel sounds together. The vowel sound /ē/ with a different consonant at the beginning. Valeri would prompt N.B. using different visual cues like making a puff motion nearing the mouth when working on /p/, or pulling down a sign language b for the /b/ sound. N.B.

is a four-year-old preschool student that has many speech errors in his language. The current goal for W.C. is saying the /v/, /f/, and /p/ sounds in all parts of a word, and increase his mean length of utterances to 5.0 words of intelligible speech. During the observation, Valeri worked in the preschool classroom with W.C. at the flour table, and she hid objects that started with /f/ in the table. W.C. As he would find the objects in the flour Valeri and W.C. would talk about the objects and practice the word. The objects that were found were based on the /f/ sound, and W.C. found a calf, a fork, a fox, a leaf, a chef, a football, a wolf, a frog, and a feather. When an object was found, Valeri would model the sound, and W.C. would repeat it. The initial /f/ sound has an added /h/ to it to help replace the /b/ sound. The /h/ sound will naturally fall away once W.C. has mastered creating /f/ with his mouth. W.C. only receives speech therapy, so Valeri services as the case manager on an IEP team that includes the preschool teacher, the parents, and the principal (LEA). Valeri does send activities home for W.C. to work on with his parents. The Articulation Station app for the iPad/iPhone is a favorite of W.C. Valeri does send home a list of apps and websites with all her students for their parents to

is a three-year-old that is brought in by her parents just for speech therapy rather than attend the school’s preschool program. J.T. is a three-year old boy that attends the preschool program three days a week. Both students are working on expressive language, and labeling common objects. In J.T.’s preschool classroom the focus of the week is the letter b, so Valeri is reinforcing that by playing a game with a bus, ball, banana, and a bee. She created a bear box, and asked the students what they thought it was. The first answer was dog, but Valeri gave hints that it is brown, it lives in a cave, and we see it in the woods. J.T. guessed a bear, and afterwards L.P. was jumping up and down yelling “yes, a bear, a bear!” Valeri taught them a song that went “Bear, bear, what do you see? Bear, bear, what do you see? What do you see that starts with b?” Valeri modeled the sentence that she wanted the students to use, “I see a…” After each student took a turn saying the sentences and feeding the bear so all the objects were gone, the bear would “burp”, and objects fell out to start again. The children thought the bear burping was funny and couldn’t stop laughing. It helped gain their attention and keep them focused on the task on hand. Valeri serves as the case manager for both students on their respective IEP teams with the preschool teacher, parents, and principal