Lingual Placement Lightbulb Moment

Just wanted to share a lightbulb moment I had this week. I have a sweet little friend who is just turned three with a severe phonological delay. His speech in highly unintelligible, but we've made good progress with marking syllabes over the last few weeks.

We've been working on a lot of sounds and oral postures for each beginning sounds. He's backing to /h/ for almost everything. Moving lips together for bilabial sounds for /b/, /p/ and /m/ was easy to see in the mirror because it wasn't hard to hold those postures. Those sounds came pretty fast!

Now that we're moving onto the /d/ sounds, finding the alveolar ridge has been frustrating for both of us! We have used mirrors but struggle to move the tongue behind the teeth, rather than in front of his teeth. I ran through my bag of tricks (tongue depressors, suckers, etc.)

This week I pulled out my iPad and opened the camera app. We put it in the stand and faced it toward us so we could see ourselves. I sat behind him so we were both in the screen. We went through all our current sounds and I said 'FREEZE' when he found the correct placement. Then he could press the picture button and catch us. Something about holding it in that spot long enough to grab the photo was enough to make the connection! We're cruising right into the next phonological process right after the holiday break! 

The picture above is one my little friend grabbed - of course his face was blurred :) 

Reason #4537 why I love the iPad! Have you used the camera on your ipad for treatment?