Shinar Z.

You probably will agree with me when I say that finding a right speech therapist for your child is not an easy task especially when a specific diagnosis is not available. For us, it’s been over a year journey working with and changing at least three therapists. In February of 2010, we had a brief pleasure working with Nicole Goldfarb before we went with another provider because of personal insurance coverage issues. Recently, my husband and I decided to go back to Nicole Goldfarb, and we are very happy with our decision.Our child is only two years old, and up until now all therapists were telling us that he is not ready for one-on-one speech therapy. They primarily worked with me, the parent, so that I carry on the training techniques at home. To the contrary, Nicole has started working with our son one-on-one right away. Remaining very playful, resourceful and energetic she is able to incorporate structure into half an hour sessions which increased our son’s attention span and made his verbal imitation skills blossom. Up until now he has been using about 75 signs to communicate with us; well, he is now slowly but happily transitioning to words using signs only to complement his speech. From the very first session my husband liked a hand-on PROMPT technique Nicole has been using. She pushes on certain oral muscles to map out the motor sequences for sounds and sound combinations; the latter is to create “muscle memory” and thus to encourage speech production. She also uses various other techniques such as play-based child-led Floortime/DIR. She never underestimates our son’s cognitive abilities by choosing age appropriate and at the same time challenging and stimulating activities such as puzzles, books, puppets for pretend play and cards to form CV, CVC, CVCV words. She continues to trains us, the parents, with Hanen-type approaches giving us very short, but specific tasks every week. Our son has still a lot of work ahead but he has done so much progress in the last two months that we feel we need to pass on our recommendations for Nicole to other parents. Nicole is a true professional, extremely organized, and reliable. She approaches each speech therapy session with such a positive attitude that is simply contagious. We recommend Nicole to you without any reservation.