Early intervention focuses on serving children from birth to age 3. Current best practice is centered around 3 principles:
Parent coaching
Routine-based interventions
Enhanced Millieu Teaching
in early intervention is to provided family centered, routine-based intervention that is focused primarily on parent coaching. Please watch these videos to gain a better understanding what this approach entails and to better understand HOW we are teaching. You can find various helpful documents here (including the print-outs for the last video. New York City also provides excellent online webinars focused on best practices in Early Intervention, which you can find here (You will need to register, click on 'catalog', and select 'Implementing Family Centered Best Practices)
This videos shows a parent coaching visit by an OT. Our goals will be speech and language-based rather than motor skills, but the basic interaction will be the same.
This video shows an SLP coaching a parent.
Learn more about Enhanced Milieu Teaching and Responsive Interaction in these videos. (the video below provides good explanations, but the video examples are not great and thename of the second tool should be "Responsive Interaction" rather than "Response of Interaction".
Now that we know the HOW, we need to know the WHAT! Four language-teaching strategies have been demonstrated to improve children’s language abilities, and these strategies are what we will teach caregivers. These are: prelinguistic milieu teaching, to help children make the transition from pre-intentional to intentional communication; enhanced milieu teaching, which consists of specific techniques embedded within a child’s ongoing activities and interactions; responsive interaction, which involves teaching caregivers to be highly responsive to the child’s communication attempts; and direct teaching, characterized by prompting, reinforcing and giving immediate feedback on grammar or vocabulary within highly structured sessions. In all cases, it is important to set the stage for language learning by creating opportunities for communication, following the child’s lead, and building and establishing social routines. Depending on the needs of our clients, our sessions will focus primarily on coaching caregivers in prelingusitic millieu teaching, millieu teaching and/or responsive interaction.
I have collected a variety of resources for you and for parents, which can be found here.