Sensory Strategies That Support Communication: Practical Tools for Therapists and Parents

In this session, speech-language pathologist Jessie Ginsburg, known online as the Sensory SLP, joins host Mick Olds to talk about how sensory strategies can open the door to communication. Jessie is trained in sensory integration, the creator of the Inside Out Sensory Communication Program, and the author of Ready Set Connect.

She traces how a non-speaking three-year-old and a boombox taught her what her training had not, and why she now writes communication goals while using sensory strategies as the approach to reach them. Together they walk through how to read a child in the first few minutes of a session, when to meet high energy and when to bring it down, and why the same trampoline gives a seeker and a bystander opposite results. Jessie lays out her language staircase, with regulation and engagement underneath basic and higher level language, and explains why months of "I want ball, I want train" sessions were starting one floor too high. She and Mick also make the case for the child who is easiest to miss, the under-stimulated kid who looks calm and easy, and for using less language, fewer questions, and more silence when a child is dysregulated.

Therapists, educators, and parents will come away with a temperature check to start every session, ways to build regulation into routines that also carry language goals, and permission to skip the gym and use whatever spins in the room. Grounded in Jessie's clinical work and her own household of five boys with five sensory profiles, this session is a practical, generous look at what changes when regulation comes first.