Melanie Weber
speaker
894 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2023
last heard 23 Oct
Melanie Weber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
And I wasn't trying to change his words.
I was just trying to give him words that more matched what the intention he had behind it was.
And that's when I really started to understand him and I started to understand his world.
And once I dove into that approach and we focused on his strengths, I can tell you his language exploded.
He made more progress in one year than he had in 14 years of speech therapy.
And that's not, that's not me tooting my own horn.
That has nothing to do with me being a magician.
That's everything to do with when you're using the wrong approach, it's harder versus when you use the right approach for that child.
And once we found the approach that worked for him, his language took off.
It was an absolutely amazing to see.
And I like sharing his story too, as a good lesson, that it's never too late to change your approach.
You know, he was 15 when we started this and he had been in therapy forever and made very minimal progress.
But the moment we started using a strengths-based neuroaffirming approach where we focused on his echolalia and we didn't try to ignore it or reduce it or eliminate it, but we built on it and we used it as a bridge to communication, his language absolutely took off.
So
Echolalia does not have to be a barrier.
Instead, I like looking at it like a bridge.
We're going to use it to cross over into more self-generated communication.
So the next time you hear a kid repeating lines from a movie, and maybe they're saying it over and over again, instead of just ignoring it or trying to get them to stop what they're doing, pause, really listen, think if there's something they're trying to communicate.
Sometimes they are just using it to regulate.
It may not be a communicative intent.
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