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epilepsy and speech - what do you do for school??
Sun, 03/02/2008 - 07:40my daughter's speech is GREATLY affected by her epilepsy (due to where the seizures are taking place in her brain.) we have gone to ASL with her although she is still in speech once a week. this has greatly helped her communicate - praise God!
we are looking toward pre-school years now and are not sure where she fits school wise. her seizures are not under control and although she uses ASL - she hears and understands things perfectly.
anyone else in this situation? what have you done school-wise? we will not be using the computer thing that would "speak" for her.
tia!
Re: epilepsy and speech - what do you do for school??
Submitted by tristar on Sun, 2009-11-29 - 19:05
My daughters speech wasn't affected when she first started school but about two and a half years ago deteriorated dramatically. She'll be 8 in January but now achieves communication at the level of a 2 year old. Her speech and language therapist said that she had single channel thought process, where she could only think about one thing at a time, and word finding difficulties. Using prompts such as pictures or saying the beginning sound of a word for her often helped. She has recently moved to a special school as she has deteriorated so much, but there they use methods to help constantly as they specialize in problems like hers and she has come on incredibly since starting there. One of the biggest problems we faced with the mainstream school was they didn't know how to deal with her and she was often frustrated and would lash out, which resulted in these incompetent teachers getting her comfy and letting her sleep all day, which in turn caused the knock on effect of her never sleeping well at night, making her tired during daytime, making everything worse. A vicious cycle caused, in my opinion, by the schools lack of care and understanding of her condition. Things can improve with the right help. I was also told by the speech therapist that by answering questions for her, instead of trying to prompt her, I wasn't helping. Oops! It took quite a while to get out of that habit but we live and learn.