Last Tuesday Ruth, started her speech therapy.  Because she is dropping both beginning and ending sounds, not using tenses, using very few descriptive and action words, and because she has so few consistent consonant sounds - because of all of these, they qualified her for a one hour session each week.  They don't have enough speech therapist at the moment, so a developmental therapist, who has also has speech training is coming to the house on Tuesday mornings.  They mostly play a variety of games where Ruth is suppose to identify objects.  As far as Ruth is concerned she has a "new fwiend to pway wiff."  The first Tuesday Ms. Leah worked mostly on B and P with her.  She said, that she knows the sound because she says "peas" (please), but words like open come out owen or owwee.  She would make her sing O-Pen stressing the different syllables and making Ruth look at her mouth.  Then they would open the toy together.  They also worked on B because Ruth can say "Bit" (Britt) but ball comes out "all" (additionally so does anything that rhymes with ball, like small or call, or doll, hence the problem we have in figuring out what she is saying).  Yesterday, they worked on animal names and sounds.  She was able to give us some homework.  To help Ruth hear and see what she's missing, Ms. Leah wants us to make her watch our mouth when we are talking.  Part of her problem is that she's being lazy, and doesn't move her lips much when she talks.  Also, sing-songing and over enunciating is suppose to help her hear the sounds she's dropping, so she will start mimicking them.  Her only two constant consonant sounds are m and c, and she should have alot more constant sounds at this age.  Britt gets to play some too, but he gets in trouble for telling her the answers when she is suppose to be identifying objects.  Ms. Leah said that he can be a big help in teaching her how to pronounce things, but the problem with him telling her the answers is that often she won't then try to say anything, but rather says "uh-huh" or "yep" agreeing with Britt, rather than telling us what an object is.  We've already seen some improvement, and we better know how to help her, so I think it's a win-win.