Start your spelling journey here

---

A journey is a long process of personal change and development.  It is growing and changing and coming to terms with who and what you are and loving what you are.

With learning to spell to communicate, your child and your family will begin a life changing journey where you may, for the first time, get to know who your child really is inside.  Think about that and hold on to that thought as you begin this process.  

It's not quick. 

Enjoy the journey.

What an exciting time, you've found Spelling to Communicate! Spelling to Communicate (S2C) is a robust form of reliable communication for nonspeaking people, including minimal and unreliable speakers. 

So if you find that your child doesn't talk at all, they are candidate for S2C.  

If your child talks very little, they are a candidate for S2C. 

Or if your child does not always say purposeful things like maybe they repeat the same things over and over or maybe they repeat scripts or movie lines without necessarily any point in it that you can figure out, they are a candidate for S2C.  

Until now, assumptions have been made that nonspeakers have cognitive and intellectual impairments, but as more of them find freedom through an effective means of communication, they are teaching us the opposite is true.  Many if not most are cognitively at grade level, they just may not look like it or sound like it. But keep in mind, listening does not have a "look". When you're listening, as these kids do all the time, you're just taking information in.  It is not until called upon to state your opinion or answer a question that we know what information was retained.  For our nonspeakers and unreliable speakers, we don't know what was taken in because they haven't been able to tell us.

Until now.

Many of our "spellers" as we  call them, describe their inability to speak as a "brain-body disconnect" and they want us to know that their "outsides don't match their insides". Meaning they may look like they're not paying attention, they may look like they don't care, they may not be able to smile on command when taking pictures, but they want to. And they are listening and they do understand.

So with this in mind, by changing our lense of the way we look at them, we can find a whole new way to help them. Put the thought in your head that they are intact inside and they are just waiting for you to find a way to let you know that.

You just found it.

Speech is the most complicated of all fine motor skills, and can be affected by sensory-motor differences.  The amazing thing that has been discovered is that the language center in the brain, which is a cognitive function, is completely intact in nonspeaking people. 

It is the motor system that has difficulty with the process of completing movements.  The brain takes information in and then creates messages based on that information for the body, like the mouth for example to say something like an answer to a question at school, and it doesn't come out right, or it doesn't come out at all, 

and it looks like they didn't understand.

But they did.

With S2C we take the fine motor aspect of communication and use the whole arm in a gross motor movement to point to letters on a series of increasingly complex letterboards.

Just like learning any new skill, prompting is provided during the acquisition phase and slowly faded as fluency increases.

A Communication Regulation Partner (CRP) practices the motor movements by providing age-appropriate, cognitively stimulating, interesting lessons to the speller, and supporting them as they acquire the skills of spelling to communicate.

This methodology helps the body to build strong neural and muscular pathways.  

We like to say

"practice makes permanent"

Check out our Frequently Asked Questions for even more answers to your questions and more  information

At this point, contacting a Certified S2C Practitioner to answer more questions you have and set up a session with them to see if S2C is for your child and for your family.