Spark Speech is a pediatric speech therapy studio and discovery lab in West Hollywood, CA. We work hard to make sure your child makes great progress and has a great experience here! That's what it's all about, fellow Sparks!
Every child deserves the chance to be heard and understood...to tell their stories, opinions, dreams! They have so much to say! And they need good speech and language skills to socialize and learn. Let's help.
Spark Speech's studio is a lab of discovery where we learn what helps your child, and your child learns that they are great communicators. It is a safe and fun place to discover and to build skills and confidence.
Here, we take a fresh, dynamic approach to speech therapy, one that is centered on building a special relationship with your child and basing activities on their interests.
Every session is filled with carefully planned delight and wonder along with focused use of effective, evidence-based therapy methods. We do a lot of structured play and imaginative projects that have a purpose. Targeted, proven methods are incorporated to make the most progress. Basically everything here is engaging and done with your child's goals in mind.
For articulation of more difficult sounds, we use a variety of strategic techniques to help your child first hear and produce the sounds correctly in isolation, then immediately work on generalizing the good new sound productions into single words and conversational speech. Sometimes a variety of techniques are needed, since we don't all respond the same to each method or way of producing a sound. We customize this to what works for your child.
For kids with special sensory needs, we use supports to increase their participation, engagement and understanding. Literally a part of life here, we provide appropriate supports for our kids on the Autism Spectrum, and also kids with other specific needs such as Intellectual Disability, Specific Language Impairment, ADHD, or Down's, Angelman, Williamson, Tourette's, Fragile X, and other syndromes. We're all about calming and waking up the senses, including visual and touch cues, emotional affect and verbal/auditory support, and use of movement, music, and texture. And we use engagement, intrinsic motivation, pacing, and consistent behavioral rewards.
Together, we work for dramatic breakthroughs along with gradual, steady improvement. There's literally nothing more exciting than seeing our kids nail a new skill.
We create and follow an individualized therapy plan with specific goals tailored to build upon your child's strengths to make improvements in areas of need.
If your child has or needs an AAC (Alternative / Augmentative Communication) system such as ProLoQuo2Go on iPad or low-tech solutions such as PECS), we help with setup and training, and incorporate this into the therapy plan.
Your areas of concern are also part of the plan, and we figure out what your child needs most right now for success in school, at home, and in the community. The plan is simultaneously practical and involves high expectations for your child.
Spark Speech currently offers individual, one-hour weekly sessions to provide the singular, in-depth focus that our kids need.
Parents are involved all along the way, with video and written guides and fun homework (as appropriate) provided to you. Carry-through at home is important in helping your child achieve his or her goals as quickly and fully as possible. Home practice also allows for generalization of skills across real life settings. We provide the tools to help with this.
Collaborative contact with teachers, other therapists, and any other important people in your child's life is also a routine part of what we do, as long as you are comfortable with this. It can be important to have their input and let them know what we are doing and how they can help.
Sessions are videotaped, with illustrative parts shared with you to show you directly how to work with your child. And breakthroughs can be watched together with your child so you can celebrate with each other!
We also do outreach with university researchers in speech, language, and learning, to seek their counsel and to implement directly their research-based techniques, providing them with anonymous data/feedback. This keeps us up-to-date and helps spread the benefits of the latest research.
Spark Speech also collaborates with colleagues in China, and hopefully soon other countries, to promote support of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, using speech and language therapy techniques beyond ubiquitous ABA there, promoting more naturalistic language development.