Auditory Verbal Therapy

What is Auditory Verbal Therapy (AVT)?
Auditory Verbal Therapy is an individualised, auditory, developmental programme, implemented by us, Isobel's parents in close collaboration with a therapist. The goal Isobel is for her to achieve age appropriate spoken language, and full social participation throughout childhood and beyond.

Auditory-Verbal practice is a parent centered approach to help children like Isobel to learn to talk through listening.

AVT focuses on the use of sound (audition) for learning and gaining meaning from the environment. We as the parents, are at the centre of this approach and have to take a full and active part in every session with the AV therapist. That means that, we actually become Isobel's therapists. Our weekly sessions on Skype are to hopefully help us to learn how to provide the most productive and positive experiences to stimulate Isobel's verbal communication and to check up on her progess.

This approach is distinctive in the way it maximises the child's use of hearing as the primary sense for developing spoken language rather than visual clues.

Our AVT Session

We had our first session today and Isobel did well showing her therapist how she can do the Listening Test Game. We had a good chat with our therapist and Isobel's hearing is coming along well and she is definately hearing a lot of new sounds and developing new language already.

We have new homework, moving on from the basic hearing game to using the Ling Six sounds that I mentioned in a previous post. We have losts of new games to play using lots of different sounds encouraging Isobel to join in, but giving her time to say the sounds spontaneously.

And so we are embarking on the next step of our journey, we will become adept at mmm, oooooo, aaaahhh,  eeeeee, shshshshsh and sssssssss (Ling Six sounds). We will sing songs, ring the door bell and knock on doors all in the effort of helping Isobel's hearing and speaking.