May '22 - United States and Dyslexia

🌱 As we are wrapping up an exciting month of growth; we welcome our new members to the community and celebrate our engaged community

🏈 We launched our Noala platform into the United States - connected with our new US ambassador, Rachael Iaquinto, and chatted about the floor time approach on an Instagram Live

🖥 We learnt more about dyslexia thanks to our Instagram Live with Francesca Beard, during which she shared her experiences with dyslexia and how to be more inclusive and advocate, and during our April Noala Club exploring how SLTs can positively impact children with dyslexia

💙 Thank you to each and every one of you for the continuous support, enabling Noala to grow - let's keep building the future of speech and language therapy together! 

For Noala Club, we discussed evidence-based research on dyslexia, see the links and takeaway below:

Research: 

• American Speech-Language-Hearing Association - Understanding dyslexia in the context of developmental language disorders
• ICAN Talk Series - Speech, Language and Communication needs and literacy difficulties
• National Institute of Health - Five ways speech-language pathologists can positively impact children with dyslexia

Takeaways: 

• Although Speech and Language therapy is about fostering communication skills, there is very little research and courses about Dyslexia available in the UK
• The involvement of schools is key in early identification and intervention. Teacher expectations when it comes to writing skills need to be adjusted for children with dyslexia
• We should develop a positive awareness of dyslexia
• Dyslexia is apart of you and we aim to develop a positive awareness about dyslexia

We would love to hear from you! Feel free to share your experience working with children, schools, families and communities with the Noala community on our forum

Join the next Noala Club, 19 May

Meet Rachael Iaquinto, MA, CCC-SLP based in the US

What piece of advice would you give to a family you are working with?

It is important to get on your child's level and to follow their lead - it might not feel structured or like they learning, but they learn so much through play. All our interests and hobbies are stemmed from play. It's about figuring out what their interests are and affirming that for them. 

What piece of advice would you give to a therapist?

Don't be afraid to be silly with your younger clients, get on their level and follow their lead.

Noala United States Ambassador and her experience with the platform

What drew me first to Noala, was the team and how they listened to what I said, affirmed what I had to say and utilised it in the platform. Then the structure of the platform and the layout of the screen - as a speech therapist you don’t want to be switching between many screens, but with Noala you can really focus on your client in the therapy they doing and the connection building with the client.

In case you miss our Insta Live, you can rewatch the video here

Other news we've been reading

🏷 RCSLT releases "The Sustained Impact of Covid-19 on Speech and Language Therapy Services in the UK" giving insight to the affects on SLTs and the services delivered post pandemic

👶 Hidden waits: the lasting impact of the pandemic on children’s services in the community in NHS Confederation

💻 VA study shows benefits of telestroke program for patients in HealthCareITNews

🏎 Lewis Hamilton discloses how he copes with the difficulties of dyslexia in Essentially Sports

Noala Updated Features

🌏 Noala World

Changing the way we do online sessions, our exercises are now interactive for both the therapist and patient during sessions

🙋‍♀️ Request an exercise

You can now request new exercises directly from our platform. Our content creator team commits to produce it within a week

📚 Noala Library

Fresh resources have been included in our library including: exercises on bilingualism, autism, s consonant clusters and speech sound strategies

🏈 United States launch

Our platform is now available to the United States, with included features such as the SuperBill invoice and being HIPAA compliant

Tell us which feature you want next

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