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If you have a child with a speech disorder or impairment, speech therapy involves assessing and treating all types of speech disorders and communication problems.  Speech therapists use a variety of techniques like language intervention and articulation therapy activities.

Speech conditions range from articulation delays to complex disorders like down syndrome, autism, motor speech disorders, hearing impairment, and other developmental problems that affect children.

Speech-language pathology meets the child where they are according to their individual issues.  While the main goals of a speech therapist is to improve communication, there are other benefits that help children in a number of ways.

If you’re unsure whether speech therapy is suitable for your kid, here are five benefits you should to know:

1. Enhanced Articulation Skills

One of the benefits speech therapy offers kids who need it is enhanced articulation skills. In speech, articulation refers to a child’s ability to move their lips, tongue, palate, and jaw to produce speech sounds or phonemes.

Speech issues have a lifelong negative effect and should be addressed immediately. If you have a kid that has a speech disorder, his articulation skills may be compromised due to decreased intelligibility if no speech therapy is offered. Intelligibility refers to people’s understanding of your child’s speech.

Getting a speech therapist to help your child develop articulation skills can ensure that he produces sound patterns or speech sounds in a way that increases intelligibility in the future.

2. Improved Expressive Language

Although speech is primarily involved in developing a person’s motor ability to speak, language is more symbolic of rules used to pass a message. Symbols can include words that are either written or spoken. They may also include the use of gestures like waving to mean ‘bye bye’, shoulder shrugging to mean ‘I don’t know,’ or raising eyebrows to communicate surprise.

Hiring a speech therapist can help children with speech disorders learn new words, and combine them to form sentences and phrases. This enables children to communicate better with you and other people.

3. Develop Receptive Skills

Another benefit of speech therapy for kids is the development of receptive or listening skills. Speech therapists work with kids to improve their receptive language to listen and understand better. In many cases, kids have a strong sense of what they understand but struggle with expressive language.

If your child struggles with receptive and expressive language, a speech therapist can help him overcome this challenge. Speech therapists do this by teaching them new vocabulary and showing them how to apply it when answering questions, following directions, and engaging in simple conversations.

4. Reduced Stuttering

Some kids develop stuttering during childhood. Stuttering is a common speech disorder that affects kids’ speech fluency. Often, this disorder is characterized by a broken speech flow known as disfluencies. Although every person experience disfluency in speech at one time or another, too many disfluencies can affect one’s ability to communicate effectively.

Primary indicators of stuttering that may require the help of a speech therapist include prolongations, repetitions, blocks, and interjections. Some secondary behaviors may also be present in severe stuttering cases. These include tension in the face, chest, jaw, neck, and shoulders.

People with severe stuttering conditions may also flare their nose, blink their eyes and perform odd facial movements. Further, they may experience extraordinary motor movement with their upper and lower limbs, like stomping their feet and clenching their fists.

Whether your kid shows mild or severe stuttering behavior, working with a speech therapist can help them develop strategies for controlling such behavior in a way that enhances speech intelligibility and fluency.

5. Reduce Voice Hoarseness

The other benefit that speech therapy could offer kids is reducing voice hoarseness caused by voice disorders. In most cases, kids experience hoarseness, a voice disorder that results from vocal abuses that damage or strain their vocal folds.

Vocal abuse includes habits like yelling, coughing, excessive talking, and throat clearing. Speech therapy enables kids to repair damaged or weakened vocal folds while helping them reduce practices relating to vocal abuse. Moreover, speech therapy can help kids improve voice quality by addressing sound vibration in the nasal, oral, and pharyngeal cavities.

Final Thoughts and Resources

Speech therapy is an effective way of treating speech disorders in children. Everyday speech disorders that affect kids in their childhood include poor articulation, hoarseness of voice, stuttering, and receptive language. This will more than likely bring increased anxiety.

If these disorders are left unaddressed, the ability of your child to communicate effectively in the future may be affected. If you think your kid suffers from a speech disorder or impairment, engaging a speech therapist can help him overcome the challenge and communicate better as he grows up.

Explore this guide on speech pronunciation for kids, provided by Maryville University.  The guide provides detailed insights and resources on the following topics:

• Types of Speech Disorders
• Activities Parents Can Use to Teach Pronunciation
• Helpful Tools and Professional Speech Therapy
• Meeting Speech Pronunciation Goals for Kids and more

Explore Additional Resources on this website:

• The pros and cons of online speech therapy for kids
• The benefits of text to speech readers

More so than ever before, today’s kids are a generation of digital learners. Technology such as videos and smartphone apps are revolutionizing the way parents teach their kids the basics, such as their ABC’s and 123’s. And among the wide variety of options, parents need programs they know they can trust.

Kids Academy is an educational platform that offers both parents and schools a wide range of interactive learning materials to supplement early learning for kids in preschool through the third grade. Not only do they offer a website jam packed with free learning resources, but the Talented and Gifted app also provides a structured and individualized curriculum that utilizes AI technology to score worksheets and deliver feedback for standards-aligned activities. What’s more is that all content on the app is safe and age-appropriate, and there are no ads or in-app purchases.

As mentioned above, there are two main hubs for Kids Academy content: their website, and their Talented and Gifted app. Let’s take a more detailed look at what each offers to families.

Free Educational Games, Worksheets, and Videos

The Kids Academy website boasts of a huge collection of worksheets that cover subjects across different curricula to meet the educational needs of preschoolers and early elementary students. These worksheets can be downloaded, printed, or played online in a browser; and for all the options there’s auto-checking that can deliver immediate feedback. In all, there are over 3,000 worksheets on a variety of topics that include catchy graphics and engaging voiceovers to help struggling readers and pre-readers.

In addition to worksheets, Kids Academy is also compiling a fun collection of interactive learning games that children can play for free from their web browser. Parents can find a little bit of everything in their collection of games, including foundational skills for preschoolers, such as letter tracing or sorting games, as well as more advanced games to help older kids master concepts like skip counting or using decimals.

Another exciting resource on the Kids Academy website is engaging learning videos and songs that serve to teach learners about the very concepts they are already working on using the worksheets. Many times, the videos are hosted by real educators who directly teach the concept and walk children through a connected worksheet available on the website. In fact, the site offers parents an option to select complete lessons in which worksheets, quizzes, games, and videos are bundled together to make cohesive lessons without needing to compile the materials separately. It’s never been easier for parents to find exactly what their child needs, all in one place!  Discover additional online learning resources for kids of all ages.

The Talented and Gifted App from Kids Academy

While many of the same resources included in the Talented and Gifted app are also available on the website, the app has a multitude of unique features that make for a richer, more individualized learning experience. Worksheets, videos, and games are all included in the app, but parents and students will also benefit from the following:

• Structured curricula that take children along a learning pathway via chapters and lessons. Parents choose the starting grade or skill level, and children progress gradually as they learn and gain skills.

• Quizzes that recap what’s been learned and assess a student’s progress; in addition to that, parents receive a weekly progress report via email that details their child’s performance.

• The app contains different choices for how content is displayed; for instance, there is an Adventure Land section where activities are grouped around small, digestible topics and always include game to make for a more engaging experience for struggling learners.

• There is a motivational game called Dress-Up Eddie, which is an exciting element that gives children the ability to spend the earned points to customize a cute character with funny costumes.

In all, there are over 4,000 activities contained within this educational app to keep kids motivated and learning. Just like the content included on the website, all materials in the app are age-appropriate, cover all major subjects, and are created in partnership with expert educators who have curated high-quality learning content in a way that learners will love.

In just the past couple of decades, the way that children learn has drastically changed. Parents and their children now have the option to supplement learning with innovative technology that can boost early learning skills like never before! Kids Academy helps families in this endeavor by providing the highest quality learning materials on both their website and mobile app.

Find out even more about Kids Academy and look for their app on Google Play or on the App Store!

The American mathematician Paul Lockhart affirms that Mathematics is the “art of explanation”. A quote which hits the nail on the head: as a Science it is of enormous importance, because it can be used to describe a multitude of real phenomena and to help us understand the world around us.

Therefore, ideally, people should become familiar with the world of numbers and learn at an early age how to use them to solve problems.

Equipped with an understanding of the basic concepts of mathematics, children learn to describe and analyze quantities, discover space and shapes, establish relationships between objects, etc. In other words, they acquire skills and competencies that help them, from that moment on, to better know and understand reality and to respond to it according to their needs.

This is why a child’s first contact with mathematics represents a crucial moment that can mark their subsequent relationship with maths.

The teaching innovation for a “friendly” mathematical approach to problem solving

This is where the methodological approach takes on vital importance. Mathematical curricular learning must be strongly influenced by the latest technological innovations and new pedagogical strategies, so that young pupils can benefit from a program tailored to their needs and immediately receive the keys to interpret their environment and carry out problem solving from a numerical perspective.

And, along these lines, the new techniques selected and developed to teach this subject place less emphasis on calculation, while prioritizing customized content and the use of efficient mechanisms to reinforce the most important conceptual aspects.

As such, the most pioneering approaches propose ‘simple mathematics’ techniques, where the manipulation of objects and the performance of simple exercises are the paths by which children can achieve four clear objectives:

• Problem solving
• The ability to reason, deduce and argue
• The ability to connect ideas and/or concepts
• The ability to both communicate and represent mathematical information via any channel

Learning mathematics through video games is possible

One of the first forms of manipulative teaching to emerge in Spain is the ‘ABN Method (Algorithms Based on Numbers)’. It was devised by Jaime Martínez Montero in order to make it easier to learn traditional mathematics, thanks to the use of operations that are completely understandable by the pupil. How? Quite simply, by converting quantities into realities that can be manipulated: lentils, marbles, toothpicks or rubbers. Thus, through visualization and manipulation, pupils assimilate the mathematical concept behind each figure much more easily, from outside the world of numbers, in addition to learning to establish associations.

However, at ProFuturo we have gone a little further, by developing an even more distinctive and innovative methodology for learning mathematics. Through the collaboration of Fundación Telefónica Perú and the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Perú, we have promoted the ‘Mathemagical Oracle’ project as a didactic and gamified learning approach to this branch of knowledge.

The result of this work has been the creation, by computer programmers and educators from the aforementioned university, of a pioneering application in Latin America. This application is aimed especially at pupils between the ages of 10 and 14 so that, through an approach based on exercises and games, they can learn mathematics in a fun and adventurous context. Mainly, because the video game motivates pupils, presenting them with constant challenges and constant trial and error situations, within an interesting narrative context that blends history and magic.

In fact, it is no coincidence that the characters pupils may encounter on their adventures within the application are strongly inspired by great mathematicians of universal renown, such as Hypatia of Alexandria, Liu Hui, Leonardo Fibonacci or Alan Turing. And so, guided in this manner, children and young people approach the development of their mathematical skills with passion and ambition, and enjoy tackling problems that, in another context, they might find uncomfortable and boring.  Access to academic mentoring support can also help students build confidence in mathematics, strengthen study habits, and approach problem-solving with greater consistency and motivation.

‘Problem Solving in the World of Numbers’, an accessible resource to make math easy

And that’s not all, because, by way of our resources directory, we also make available to teachers the teaching unit ‘Problem Solving in the World of numbers’. Because this is meant to be a starting point for the curricular learning of Mathematics, it proposes a series of customizable challenges for pupils which give them the opportunity to face challenges involving reasoning, deduction or analysis.

For its correct use children (ages 6 to 8) will not need to already be familiar with this discipline. Because, in reality, this unit poses some ‘simple mathematics’, while offering teachers the necessary tools to guide pupils through its most relevant concepts. So that, once they have finished, they understand the cultural and social usefulness of numbers, know how to use them in simple tasks (ordering, comparing or identifying) and learn to interpret, organise and represent them in different contexts.

In short, tremendously useful skills that get them off to a good start in the world of mathematics and, more importantly, motivate them to approach mathematics with desire and enthusiasm, thanks to a methodological approach where their experience is the central axis and the idea of learning by playing is behind each exercise.

Learn about limits in calculus (definition and rules) and why students find limit calculation difficult.

We all want to give our pets the best chance for a long, lovely life. Many pet owners have deciding that one of the best ways to do this is to protecting them with pet insurance. The first step in your journey towards exploring options for pet insurance plans is to crystal clear on your pet’s medical history.

By looking at your pet’s age, the breed of dog or cat that they are, and what illnesses they may be prone to becoming a victim to over the course of time, you can prioritize the elements of their health that are most vital. But everything comes with a cost, and pet insurance is no different.

Pet Insurance Affordability

What is the most that you can afford to pay in order to make your pet’s insurance a reality? Compile a list of what types of accidents and illnesses that need to be covered and the percentage of those particular costs that you are capable of paying for.

While you are obtaining quotes from pet insurance providers, understand that many of their prices will fluctuate due to factors such as whether you and your pet live in congested urban landscapes or in rural country regions.

Best Pet Insurance Options

Pet insurance plans have multiple variables crammed into the fine print that can often appear frustratingly similar to what each pet insurance company is offering the exact same thing as the one you looked into prior to it. But each company usually has its own variations of three core offerings: benefits, coverage, and premiums.

Familiarize yourself with the policies that you are interested in and make sure that they will reimburse you for the actual type of coverage that your pet will be in need of, such as accidents, illnesses, exam fees, and medications. When you are filing a claim, customer service becomes increasingly important. Be sure to ask a company questions that you have about their offerings.

Pet insurance rankings in 2022 have led the economic news organization Money to recognize the pet insurance provider Pumpkin as the “Best for Puppies and Kittens,” offering preventative care packs, competitive deductible amounts of $100, $250, and $500, providing a 90% reimbursement option that is among the highest of its competition, annual limits of $3000-$7000, and multi-pet discounts available to its customers.

But before considering which policy plan has the best potential for a long-lasting series of positive outcomes for your pet, here are some insurance terms every pet owner should get familiar with in order to pick the best pet insurance policy results in 2022.

Policy

This refers to the entirety of your pet health insurance plan that includes items such as coverage, premiums, deductibles, benefits, and coinsurance.

Coverage

This pertains to exactly what the policy will reimburse you for, which is mainly unexpected vet fees and related expenses. Accident and illness coverage tends to be the most common health insurance. Coverage can be used normally for things like labs, treatments, medications, and fees.

Perfect coverage would include any treatment and condition that may arise. Specialty coverage can even include hiring a pet sitter if you as the policyholder are one day hospitalized; advertising for (and paying) a lost-pet reward; a pet’s acupuncture and hydrotherapy; or emergency vet treatment while traveling overseas.

Accident and illness coverage

This is a comprehensive form of coverage for vet treatments, medications, diagnostic testing, and surgeries for brand new injuries, sicknesses, or diseases your pet is diagnosed with while insured.

Accident-only coverage

This form of coverage only applies to injuries from accidents, like broken bones.

Benefits

Whenever we start talking about benefits, essentially, we’re discussing the dollar amount your pet insurance provider will pay you for a covered incident that happened to your cat or dog during a given time period, compared with how much you have paid for insurance coverage.

Benefits are a means of determining the pet insurances that yield the best results during your search because the good benefits pay as much as possible for a covered incident. Often you may hear the term “benefits” used interchangeably with “coverage.”

Premiums

This is the dollar amount that you pay each month for the coverage and benefits that you receive. The short answer is the better the coverage and benefits that you have acquired, the higher the premium price will be.

Deductible

This refers to the amount you’re responsible for paying before a claim that you file can be reimbursed by the insurance company. Depending on the plan that you have selected, the deductible starts over on an annual basis or applies to individual conditions over the life of your cat or dog.

Coinsurance

This is the percentage of your bill that you must pay that excludes the deductible. Let’s say, for instance, if your policy coinsurance is 10%, that means the insurance company will reimburse your vet expenses up to 90%, minus the deductible and any other excluded expenses.

Waiting period

This refers to the medical-exclusion time period between the start of the policy, and it can last anywhere from two days to 30 days for accidents or illnesses. Make sure that you are aware that you will only be reimbursed for medical expenses that occur after the waiting period. Any conditions diagnosed during the course of the waiting period will be excluded from coverage eligibility.

Policy value

The value of a pet insurance policy is typically the annual limits of how much money can be spent on your pet for medical procedures that year, the deductible amounts that need to be paid in order to redeem the money the provider will reimburse you with, and the percentage of the services being billed that can be reimbursed.

Covered costs

These are the billed services that can be covered by pet insurance and are not restricted. Typically there are some illnesses or treatments that have limited coverage, but exam fees for bringing in your injured animal to the vet are not covered. But luckily, exam fees are fairly inexpensive in comparison to other treatments.

Pets are part of the fabric of our lives.  The a true companions that offer unconditional love. Their presence even known to provide mental health benefits through animal therapy. Therefore, it’s difficult to put a price tag on the value of our relationship to our pets.  With this article at least, you now have the vocabulary to properly pick the pet insurances that yield the most optimal results for your loving dog or cat in 2022.

Pet Ownership and Child Development

Owning and caring for a pet is a big responsibility.  As we have mentioned there are many benefits that make the cost worthwhile.  When kids are involved, there are great life skills to be learned.  It’s also worth exploring the role of pets in childhood development, including how it contributes to developing neurodiverse children.  Is a pet right for your family?  Make sure to do your research and seek out all the advice available on getting a family pet.