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Posted by callie on 5/5/2009, 4:50 pm, in reply to "Re: R"
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Sorry Dawn, but me might just have to agree to disagree here. I also have a number of 4th graders working on /r/ and progressing nicely. In my opinion, it hasn't hurt them at all to wait for speech therapy. If anything, they are more aware of their own speech, monitor themselves better, and motivation to improve can be greater. They are better able to do the cognitive processing that's necessary to make effective, long term changes in the motor movements.
In addition, I have screened quite a few children in 3rd grade at teacher request and found that /r/ is emerging. Six months later, errors are much less frequent. By 4th grade, you wouldn't know they'd ever had difficulty with /r/. These are the students I can't afford to work with. I have nearly 60 students on my caseload, many with very high needs. I simply don't have the time to help a child learn to do something he's going to learn to do on his own. I agree that it's sometimes difficult to tell which ones are going to "get it." That's why I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. Just a difference in philosophy between us, I guess. I think we each have to do what works for us.
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