Supporting your child to communicate confidently and build meaningful relationships
At Talk & Bloom®, we offer high-quality, evidence-based services to support your child’s development in social skills, communication, language, speech, and learning. Every service is personalized to your child’s strengths, challenges, and goals, ensuring effective support that promotes their overall growth. Our Services Include:
Free Initial Consultation
The initial consultation is a brief, informal conversation to determine whether your child is reaching age-appropriate communication and developmental milestones.
You may request a free consultation if you are concerned about:
- Understanding or processing language
- Using language or communicating effectively
- Ability to play and interact with others
- Pronunciation of sounds and words
- Attention and participation in activities
- Progress compared with peers
Whether you are seeking reassurance or guidance, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Comprehensive Evaluation
A comprehensive evaluation is a formal, detailed assessment that creates a complete profile of your child’s functioning based on age-appropriate milestones. This profile identifies strengths and challenges, allowing us to design a personalized support plan.
Evaluations are adapted to each child and include play-based clinical observation, formal or standardized testing (when appropriate), and input from parents or caregivers. At the end of the evaluation, you receive a clear explanation of findings, professional conclusions, and recommended next steps. Early identification enables early support—critical for your child’s holistic development.
Areas Assessed May Include:
- Receptive Language: understanding language, following instructions, comprehending words and concepts, responding to questions
- Expressive Language: using language to communicate needs, ideas, or emotions through gestures, sounds, words, or sentences
- Speech (Articulation/Pronunciation): Producing clear sounds and words
- Social Communication: using verbal and nonverbal communication in social situations—eye contact, turn-taking, initiating interactions, and using language for different purposes
- Play Skills: interacting appropriately with toys, exploring different types of play, engaging in symbolic or imaginative play
- Emotional Regulation: managing emotions, behavior, and responses to daily situations and sensory experiences
- Developmental Milestones: skills that appear delayed, inconsistent, regressing, or otherwise concerning
Social Communication Therapy
Social communication refers to how children receive information and communicate with others in different situations. It includes verbal and nonverbal skills needed to build relationships, play, express needs, understand others, and participate successfully in social and school settings.
Social communication therapy focuses on helping children develop the skills they need to interact, participate, share, and communicate confidently across everyday activities and various environments (e.g., home, school, community).
Some social communication skills include:
- Responding to their name
- Sharing, showing, or pointing out objects of interest
- Noticing and joining in what others are doing
- Using facial expressions, gestures, sounds, and words to communicate
- Engaging in creative and meaningful play
- Taking turns in play and interactions
- Understanding others’ words, body language, and emotions
- Making friends and participating in group or team activities
- Recognizing different perspectives (what others want, think, or feel)
- Initiating and maintaining conversations
Emotional Regulation Skills
Emotional regulation is essential for social communication. Recognizing, managing, and expressing emotions help children communicate effectively and maintain positive relationships.
Skills addressed include:
- Co-regulation: Accepting adult support and guidance to calm down, recover, or manage intense emotions or behaviors. This is the first step toward learning self-regulation with time and practice.
- Sensory Regulation: Organizing sensory input (sight, sound, touch, movement) to maintain an alert and calm state that supports learning and participation in activities like paying attention, playing, interacting, conversing, or following routines.
Articulation/Pronunciation Therapy
Articulation therapy supports children who have difficulty pronouncing sounds and words clearly. Incorrect sound production can make speech hard to understand.
Your child may benefit if they:
- Have difficulty producing certain sounds or words
- Use a limited range of consonants or vowels for their age
- Omit sounds or parts of words (e.g., “ca” for “cat,” “pider” for “spider”)
- Substitute one sound for another (e.g., “taw” for “caw”)
- Have rhythm, accent, or intonation errors (e.g., speaking too fast, improper intonation, difficulty controlling volume)
- Are difficult for others to understand
Early support reduces frustration and helps children communicate confidently.
Language Therapy
Language therapy helps children who have difficulty understanding or using language. Sessions focus on supporting comprehension of words, phrases, and concepts, and on expressing ideas clearly and confidently.
Your child may benefit if they:
- Struggle to understand words or sentences
- Have limited vocabulary development
- Do not combine words into age-appropriate sentences
- Have difficulty forming organized sentences or telling stories in sequence
Late Talking
A late talker is a child between 18 and 30 months who shows delays in spoken language despite understanding language well and developing typically in other areas (social, motor, sensory, cognitive, and play).
Common signs include:
- Using fewer words than expected for age
- Relying more on gestures or sounds than words
- Slow vocabulary growth
- Difficulty imitating sounds or words
- No clear reason for the delay
Some late talkers catch up to their peers without any support by the time they start school. However, research shows that 20–30% of late talkers do not catch up, and they’re at risk for ongoing language difficulties (e.g., grammar, reading) or more significant problems like a language disorder. This means that difficulties increase in severity and the errors are no longer usual of typical language development.
The problem with thinking “the child will just start talking” or “needs more time” is that we cannot know who will develop as expected and who has an early language delay. That’s why early intervention is so important. Providing support as soon as possible boosts language development and leads to positive progress, forming the foundation for effective communication and academic success.
Professional Consultation
We offer professional consultation to support the broader team working with your child. Interdisciplinary collaboration ensures strategies are consistent, goals are shared, and approaches are aligned across therapy, home, and school.
Consultation services include:
- Support and training for other professionals (behavioral therapists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, educators, and support staff)
- Classroom and daycare visits to observe your child, share strategies, and promote continuity of communication support at home and school