About Spark Speech: Speech Therapy Studio and Discovery Lab
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.
Here are some of the super-engaging, sensory-appropriate tools in our studio. The underlined links go to related magazine posts discussing their communicative benefits:
Arts/crafts area (expansive and sunny, overlooking the trees)
Swings (motorcycle, magic carpet, skateboard, and spaceship)
Karaoke stage (for singing, speaking, rapping, putting on shows...)
Cooking projects kitchen
Town building area
Big library of games and books
Science experiments and microscope
Imaginative play (fossil dig, treehouse, clothing design, space station, horse barn, construction site, diy doll house, karate dojo, etc.)
Musical instruments
Video feedback and making green-screen movies
Possibly one of the world's largest felt boards (13' x 5') for imaginative storytelling
Target, Starbucks, McDonalds, and GameStop around the corner for community practice
Seriously...therapeutically useful, engaging, fun activities are what this studio was built for! So much to talk about and learn.
Finally, please remember that here, you are not alone. We listen to you and are here for you. We are building a community of parents, kids and families, with free or at-cost social activities for our clients' whole family to come participate in, and have a chance to meet other Spark families.
You are most welcome to join the community of Sparks! Please contact us for a free consultation to discuss your child and make a plan for how we might help. We usually begin with an evaluation for your child to have a clear, detailed picture of their needs, although we can also work with a recent assessment from other providers.
Upon consultation, even if you decide not to join us here as a client, we'll make sure you take away some ideas for your child to try on your own. We sincerely want to help! And we'd love to hear from you.
