LuLu's speech evaluation which, oddly, becomes a chance to brag about her :)

For some time Lisa has been trying  to get LuLu into a speech therapy program with MPS (Milwaukee Public Schools). Last week we finally had a one on one evaluation at a local school. Because we couldn't find a sitter for Lump or Smiley I took LuLu to the appointment.

I'm sure the tests were no different than any other speech test given to a five year old. Her hearing tested fine, and she did a heck of a job identifying and vocalizing every object in a shoebox of junk they handed her. She had trouble with the word 'string', pronouncing it 'sta-wing', and some issues with 's' and 'r' but otherwise held her own.

Good news/bad news: from a preliminary opinion the instructor didn't think she needed speech therapy and said she'd outgrow her problems. There's a strong history of speech problems from both sides of the family (and of course Smiley can't talk) so maybe we're just hypersensitive on the subject, but I disagreed.

If it's enough so that an adult has difficulty understanding her, or a kid makes fun of her for it, then it's bad enough to spend an hour or two a week fixing it. We'll know one way or the other midway through October.

From the certainly good news department: LuLu, who is 5 years 3 months old tested at a comprehension level of 6 years, 8 months with a vocabulary of a 6 year old. The teacher said she was the first five year old to correctly ID all the items in that box and in the pictures presented to her; at times her answers were too specific and had to be scaled back so she would verbalize the general word they were looking to hear.

Neat.

Tags: LuLu, speech