Children communicate ALL THE TIME.  From the time a child enters the world and hears it's own cry, that sound has a function.  Our role as speech therapists is to identify when that function of communication is broken, when that child is no longer meeting those milestones, sentences are not forming, intelligibility is not like his classmates.  Speech therapy is an intervention service that focuses on improving a child's speech and abilities to understand and express language, including nonverbal language. Speech therapists, or speech and language pathologists (SLPs), work with children in the following areas: 

• improving articulation of speech sounds/oral motor movements
• increasing vocabulary and word knowledge so a child can have meaningful conversations
• addressing reading/written communication skills for academic success
• focus on fluency training for disorders of stuttering/cluttering
• improving receptive language and auditory processing (following directions, reading comprehension, identification)
• improving socialization/play skills for functional participation in their environments
• Increasing phonemic awareness skills for early reading skills
• Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) programming, therapy/training and funding management.