What is Early Intervention (EI)?
In the field of speech-language pathology, SLPs (speech-language pathologists) treat a wide range of clients and all with varying ages. A small fraction of those clients include early intervention (EI), which is a term used to describe a form of service that supports babies and young children, between the ages of 0-3, to help them with suspected developmental delays and disabilities along with providing counseling services to their families. Additionally, other EI services that are offered include physical therapy, occupational therapy and other types of services based on the needs of the child and family.
When SLPs work with EI clients, the majority of their speech sessions are child-led and play-based. When following this approach, it allows for children to work on targeting early language developmental skills that might not be present in their current baseline.
Examples of some strategies that SLPs might use to help facilitate early language development includes:
Parallel Talk: Narrate what your child is doing out loud. For example: When stacking blocks, you can say, “Put the block on top! One, two, three... uh oh! The blocks fell down!”
Self Talk: Narrate what you are doing out loud. For example: When blowing bubbles and popping them, you can say, “Blow bubbles! Pop pop pop!”
For our next blog post, we will dive more into additional strategies that SLPs use for early intervention clients that can also be used at home.
Author: Nayeli Dominguez M.S., CF-SLP