After a year of running HAEPI SLP Therapy Services, we figured it's time for a reintroduction of our owner/founder and SLP, Halle Demchuk!

Halle (Ha-lee) is a proud Metis clinician, born and raised in Northwestern Ontario. She graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 2020. In addition to running HAEPI, she works for an Indigenous school board that services remote fly-in communities (furthest being on Hudson's Bay) in Northern Ontario! 

She is multi-passionate in the areas of gestalt language processing, AAC, speech sounds, literacy, and working with Indigenous populations using dynamic (non-standardized) approaches.

In her spare time, you can find Halle at the gym, eating good food with her partner, or paddle-boarding with her adventure cat, Beth @beththecat!

Let us know if you share anything in common with Halle below!

When mitigating in Stage 2 of Natural Language Acquisition, we want to use a Stage 1 gestalt that a child already has and alter it.

This can look like fitting different endings/beginnings within existing "frames," or shortening existing gestalts.

Wondering what this looks like in action? Watch as Halle demonstrates in a mock play-based speech therapy session! Tune into our FREE 1-hour webinar on GLP for more info on Stage 2.

Let us know in the comments if you found this helpful!

I get this question A LOT, and to be honest, it's a hard one to answer! Because my geographic location is an urban hub in Northern Ontario (17 hours from Toronto and 8 hours from other urban centres), it's just something that necessarily exists where I live!

I wanted to take this opportunity to share some other things I considered when choosing this position, and whether or not it would work for me! Some other reasons I love to live and work in Northern Ontario are... I'm from here, I love the outdoors, the cost of living is lower than most other parts of Canada, and we have a really great local community.

Feel free to drop other questions you have about fly-in therapy to remote Indigenous communities!

P.S., Our furthest community is located 850 km from where I live!

Articulation difficulties are VERY common, and kids don't acquire each sound at the same age.

The great thing about play-based and strength-based intervention is we can target articulation goals with children as young as 3 - there is no reason a child needs to sit at a table for speech therapy!

Swipe through to learn more about articulation milestones (or visit our page on Speech Disorders), and be sure to save the visual on the last slide to make sure your child's speech development stays on track!

When we model in Stage 1, we aren't actually modelling "gestalts" since gestalts have specific meaning to the GLP. Instead, we are modelling functional phrases (ideally across a variety of contexts) that MAY be picked up with meaning. 

Wondering what this looks like in action? Watch as Halle demonstrates in a mock play-based speech therapy session. Tune into our FREE 1-hour webinar on GLP for more info on Stage 1. 

The goal here is to fill the GLP's environment with phrases (e.g., "open it up," "put it on," "ready, set, go") that are easier to mitigate in Stage 2.

Let us know in the comments if you found this helpful!