We founded Expressable with a simple mission: to improve access to quality speech therapy services by making it affordable, convenient, and effective.
Core to our mission is to support individuals and families at every step of their speech therapy journey, extending care beyond live therapy sessions. A mountain of research has shown that when speech therapy exercises are practiced at home, integrated throughout daily routines, children and adults make more progress towards their communication goals.
With this in mind, we’re thrilled to introduce Expressable Academy - a free, comprehensive library of educational content, instructional videos, and helpful at-home exercises to complement in-session learning.
Today, Expressable Academy includes hundreds of lessons authored by our experienced team of speech-language pathologists. Each lesson is organized by the foundational speech therapy skills required to master specific communication goals.
And we’re just getting started. Every day we’ll be populating new lessons and videos. Next up: stuttering and fluency, social skills, and phonological awareness.
Whether you're a parent or caregiver helping your child reach important communication milestones, an individual seeking to improve your speech and language skills, or a speech-language pathologist looking to better support your clients with lessons and activities, Expressable Academy was built for you!
What to Expect from Each Expressable Academy Lesson
While Expressable Academy is an ongoing project, with new resources added daily, let’s take a look at one lesson to see how it works: second-person pronouns.
Use the left-hand column to navigate through each lesson and see how they’re categorized. In this case, second-person pronouns is part of a larger “pronouns” goal, which is part of the “early language development” diagnosis.
When you click into the lesson, you’ll see a few paragraphs of helpful content. This lesson provides a refresher of what second-person pronouns are, and a few exercises to practice at home (like playing the childhood favorite “peek-a-boo” game). Additionally, there’s a helpful video included.
Why is At-Home Speech Therapy Practice is So Important
Improving your communication skills is like learning any other skill: math, tennis, or guitar. Now imagine if you only practiced these new talents for an hour or so each week during class or live instruction. Will you improve over time? Absolutely. However, it’ll take you a lot longer to master the SAT, serve that winning ace, or play that flawless rendition of Stairway to Heaven.
Speech therapy is no different.
Studies that examined the impact of parent/caregiver involvement have demonstrated the vital importance of their participation. Ask any speech-language pathologist and most likely they’ll agree: when speech therapy exercises are integrated at home throughout a person’s everyday life, progress is accelerated and outcomes improve.
Expressable Academy is free for everyone - families and speech-language pathologists alike - and you definitely don’t have to be an Expressable client or a member of our team. We want to help contribute to a world where everyone is able to achieve the gift of speech, regardless of access and income. We believe initiatives like Expressable Academy are key to making this a reality.
We’re Here to Help
Can’t find something you’re looking for? Have a suggestion for new content? Have ideas for additional activities to include in an existing lesson? We’re all ears.
Expressable Academy was built for you - and we want it to be as valuable as possible. Simply send us an email at info@expressable.io.
