In-Classroom Speech and Occupational Therapy

Therapy as unique as your child’s needs.

Every child arrives with their own distinct, interconnected set of needs. A single kind of therapy, offered once or twice a week, can only ever be a band-aid on something that deserves a real answer. At The Talk School, speech and occupational therapy happen right in the classroom, alongside teachers.. We provide expert therapy that works the way your child learns.

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What Integrated Speech and Occupational Therapy Means

Your child should not have to leave a lesson to get the help they need. Here, they never do.

That is why nothing here happens in isolation. Our speech-language pathologists and occupational therapists work side by side with classroom teachers, all day, so a lesson never has to stop for therapy to happen. It simply happens within it.

The result is more therapy than most children receive anywhere else, delivered in the one place it can do the most good: right where learning is happening. What a student works on in speech is reinforced in the classroom minutes later, and what an occupational therapist notices becomes something the whole team can act on that same day.

Our Therapeutic Approaches

Four ways we support every student, every day

These approaches are never used alone. Within a single morning, a child may move through all four, so seamlessly that it simply looks like a good day at school.

Innovative Speech & Language Interventions

The Talk School’s model makes no artificial distinction between clinical therapy and education.

Our speech and language therapists provide an intensive model through one-to-one pull-out sessions and push-in to the classroom. Our goal is generalization. Our speech team works daily with the student's team so that skills are learned, maintained, and ultimately generalized. Our speech therapists provide therapies designed to support a range of speech and language needs, such as Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing (DTTC), Prompt Therapy, and Multimodal Communication.

DIR/Floortime

The idea at its heart is simple and hopeful: children learn best inside relationships they enjoy.

DIR/Floortime, developed by Dr. Stanley Greenspan and Dr. Serena Wieder, uses warm human relationships to help a child climb the developmental ladder, from simple attention and self-regulation toward genuine, purposeful communication. Our therapists get down on the floor and follow a child’s lead through play, meeting them exactly where their interest and motivation already are.

By linking a child’s emotions to their actions and their words in a joyful, unhurried way, we help them relate to the world more flexibly, more spontaneously, and more warmly, building a firmer foundation for the harder cognitive work ahead.

A smiling young child with curly hair playing on a carpet while reaching forward and holding a blue block in one hand.

Sensory Integration

For many of our students, everyday sensations, sound, touch, pressure, movement, sight, can arrive as too much, too fast.

Sensory integration is an occupational therapy approach, developed from the work of Dr. Jean Ayres, that helps a child’s brain organize and make sense of all that incoming information so the world feels manageable rather than overwhelming.

This matters more than it might first appear. A child who does not know where their body is in space, or who is flooded by ordinary sensations, cannot reasonably be expected to sit, attend, or learn. As sensory processing improves, so does a child’s ability to stay regulated, connect with people, and take part fully in their own day.

Comprehensive Therapeutic Partnering

Our care does not stop at the edges of the classroom.

When a child would benefit from support we do not provide in-house, our team helps families connect with trusted outside specialists, and we encourage parents to stay alert to treatable medical conditions, from allergies to sleep or gastrointestinal issues, that a child may not be able to name but that can quietly derail learning.

Just as we draw no line between therapy and teaching, we draw none between home and school. We ask parents to be true partners, offering training and ongoing mentoring in our approaches so the progress that starts here continues at the kitchen table. A child does best when everyone around them is working from the same page.

“Our therapists work hand in hand with the teachers, and the teachers understand at all times that we are working on communication. When we say integrated, we really mean integrated, not included.”

Louise Saruk, Talk School co-founder.

Our Approach