Speech-Language Pathologist Amy Smith shares about her work with Grace School student alumna, Peyton. This reflection is published with permission from Peyton and her family.

As a speech-language pathologist, you sometimes just immediately connect with certain children, and that is what happened with Peyton. From the time we met, she was such a bright spot every week. During the eight years I saw Peyton for individual and group speech services at Children’s Therapy TEAM, she also attended The Grace School and is now a graduate of the program.

Over the years I have had many opportunities to witness Peyton’s development and advances in skills. We worked on a variety of speech and language related tasks, including her social language skills.

One of my favorite accomplishments that stands out from my time with Peyton was her ability to self monitor her rate for asking questions of others during conversation. The Grace School taught Peyton to set a goal of asking a certain number of questions per hour and monitor her own progress over time, which eventually helped lead Peyton to be one of my most favorite conversation partners ever!  

Her work at The Grace School complimented and improved her skills that were being targeted in her speech therapy sessions.

Because she was motivated to increase her rate of questions and this skill became so fluent, it carried over to other environments. She could easily start a conversation and make appropriate comments with a variety of audiences.  It was so fun to see that skill improve! Everyone at TEAM loved to see Peyton come through the door because they knew she would have a smile and a question for them. 

Engaging others in meaningful communication is one of the foundations for developing relationships, and thanks to her hard work at The Grace School and in speech, Peyton is fantastic at this!

-Amy Smith, MCD, CCC-SLP