Autism: Our Philosophy

**Please note our new location - 871 Victoria St N, Kitchener!**

Making Connections!

We Support the Autistic Community

Our philosophy is aimed at supporting and empowering the autistic child and their family while supporting the following goals :

1) BUILDING COMMUNICATION!

We honor and build a toolbox of communication tools: building all tools including facial expressions, gestures, gestalts, single word or combinations through spoken language or AAC!

We honor both Gestalt Language Processing and Analytic Language Processing. We will help and empower the family learn more about their child's communication preferences.

2) HONORING PLAY AND SENSORY PREFERENCES

We understand that children come to us with varying abilities to regulate and various play preferences. We hope to empower parents with strategies aimed to improve overall regulation so that we can share space together in a manner that is really enjoyable for the child. We want your child LOVE their sessions and to ASK to come and play with us!

3) ADVOCATING FOR THEIR NEEDS

We have been supporting children for 19 years - we know ADVOCACY can feel like climbing a mountain. We want to help you put supports in place to increase success.

Assessments

At Speak Your Mind we take time to best understand your child's play interests, sensory preferences, views on what's hard and what's easy. The purpose of our assessments is to evaluate the child's strengths, understand their communication level, and work alongside the family to identify personal goals and foster communication growth. An assessment doesn't look need to look like a test. We do not always use standardized tests - sometimes play is a more powerful tool to show us your child's communication strengths and areas that require support

We continue to learn how to practice with neurodiversity-affirming speech, language, social communication strategies.

We practice through a lens that honours both Gestalt and Analytic Language Processing.

Group Sessions

Let's Connect! Groups

WHO: Our groups are offered to children ages 4-11 years of age who want to explore group work and learn tools and strategies to allow them to connect with peers in a safe play space. Children are matched based on age, personal goals and needs. We are very committed to ensuring group partners matched appropriately so optimal social learning and social thinking can occur. We really want the kids to connect and really enjoy sharing their time together. A group will never consist of more than 4 children.

WHAT: Our groups focus on:

- sharing opinions, thoughts and plans for play.

- perspective taking.

- working through disagreements.

- what is a "friend".

- sharing space and creating together - stories, games, making a movie, or putting on a magic show.

- connecting through small talk - what's small talk?

The SLP conducting group will meet with your child to determine goals for each session. Parent input is highly valued. Goals are created to be functional and meaningful to each child and his/her family.

Group is an opportunity for children to learn new concepts and social thinking tools; it is important to us that parents are also involved in their child's learning.