Quote Originally Posted by lizzywednesday View Post
So, what he said was that, in his experience, children with ADHD often have speech-language issues, especially in phonemic awareness. They noted this during her evaluation last week, and encouraged us to keep up with the therapy. We have currently exhausted this year's benefit w/r/t private therapy through insurance.

What I have noticed since she began speech therapy is her ability to sound out words (phonics) has improved because she's better able to match the letter with the phonetic sound it corresponds to, so I think it's helping, though we have to set time aside to do the practice homework. It's pretty easy for me to get what the speech teacher intends for the week's practice because a lot of it dovetails with my choral training, but it's often a pain in the backside to get DD to cooperate. (I've actually been using a few songs from Hamilton to complement the speech homework. I know that sounds weird, and mildly inappropriate due to some of the language, but the fact is she can't keep up with her favorite lyrics if she's not positioning her lips, tongue, and teeth correctly, so it seems to work. Unorthodox, but I'll do whatever it takes.)
This is probably due to her decreased attention. Phonemic awareness is your ability to be aware of all the speech sounds (phonemes) in a word. So, cat is /k/ + /a/ + /t/, it's 3 sounds. Phonemic awareness is a needed skill to then learn phonics - ability to match speech sound to the written letter (grapheme). If you're not aware of the speech sounds in English, you can't match a grapheme to the sound, and this affects your reading. I have one student who has severe working memory deficits and he struggles with phonemic awareness as he can't retain the earlier sounds that were spoken, so there's several things that can affect phonemic awareness. DS was struggling with reading and he had very poor phonemic awareness, so I had him tested and therapy concentrated on improving phonemic awareness skills - rhyming, breaking a word up into syllables, then breaking up into sounds, then changing the sounds e.g. /k/ + /a/ + /t/ now change the /k/ to /m/ and what word do you have e.g. mat - Note, you're not saying the name of the letter, you're saying the speech sound. Once phonemic awareness skills have been strengthened, you may need to reteach phonics as previous lessons probably weren't understood by her.

Use whatever works with your DD. If it's Hamiliton songs, go for it. I used to have DS practice in the car. I'd have him break words into sounds and use street signs and things that we saw. E.g. "stop" sign, how many sounds in "stop", sound out /s/, /t/, /o/, /p/. Ok, now do "tree", "park", "house" etc. Not for the entire car ride, but 5 or 6 words. Initially, I had to do it with him together to model it, and have him count on his fingers as we said each sound, then he could do it on his own.

In my opinion, phonemic awareness isn't taught enough or correctly in preschool, pre-K, K. I actually incorporate some practice with many students I see for speech therapy as a warm=up activity.