Hello!

Welcome to all my new readers! I’m so glad you are here!

While I know some of you personally, I wanted to take the time to introduce myself and share my mission. I’m Anna and I’m the woman behind Anna Ollinger Speech Therapy. My goal is to serve my clients and their families to the best of my ability while also fostering connection amongst readers both within and outside of the greater New York City area. We have so much to learn from one another and I hope this blog serves as a bridge to connect us.

I want to serve clients and families in a unique way. I’m a firm believer that hard work, consistency, and collaboration results in progress. Putting in a little bit of effort every day lends itself to larger gains over time.

Communication is best addressed when all communication partners are engaged, having fun, and being silly. That doesn’t just include me or the kiddo I’m working with - that also means parents, siblings, grandparents, and peers. Activities are more motivating when everyone in a child’s inner circle is involved!

No one wants to be sitting at a dinner table and listening to a monotonous, one-way conversation. We want to teach kids the reciprocal nature of communication. We do that by playing with motivating toys, making jokes and pulling pranks (hello whoopee cushions!), laughing at funny videos, or making comments about the latest GIFs or memes. There is no doubt that kids are tough critics. When we get buy-in from kiddos, we not only make more progress but we have fun while doing it!

I’m a firm believer in collaboration. First and foremost with parents. Parents know their kids best. They also spend the most amount of time with their children day in and day out. A parent’s goals and priorities are paramount when developing a plan for intervention.

Then there is collaboration with the entire time. Many of the kids I serve also receive services from an occupational therapist, physical therapist, developmental behavior pediatrician, special education teacher, learning specialist, and/or applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapist. In addition to educating them on strategies that can be used to support a child’s communication, I need to understand the ways in which I can carry over what they are working on in their sessions. For example, collaboration with an ABA therapist is crucial to understand the behavior plan of a child who engages in self-injurious behaviors. In a similar vein, an occupational therapist is my go-to resource when working on positioning for an individual who has difficulty accessing an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) system in a traditional manner.

With my business and blog, I’m also hoping to further collaborate with all of you! I’m seeing providers near and far work together more than ever as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. When everything returns to “normal” whenever that may be, I hope we don’t lose the beautiful sense of unity we’ve created in the last four weeks.

Thank you for being here! I’m so appreciative of your support and cannot wait to continue this journey together!

Anna