Since March 1998, Emily Johnson (right), a bright, energetic, four-year-old girl, has been receiving speech therapy at the Scottish Rite Childhood Language Disorders Clinic, Children's Mercy Specialty Center, at Overland Park, Kansas. She came to the clinic for evaluation due to parental concerns regarding her poor speech production. Emily's parents often found themselves interpreting Emily's speech since others found it difficult to understand.

Emily has attended numerous individual speech sessions and has demonstrated significant improvements in the areas of oral motor awareness and articulation proficiency. Her connected speech intelligibility has greatly improved. Part of her therapy includes improving her awareness and control of her tongue, jaw, and lips. Using food is a good way to work on improving tongue and jaw differentiation, and Emily loves this portion of her lessons. A while ago, Emily came to therapy and announced she thought we should "do snack" first because she was hungry! We had to negotiate five trials of tongue positioning in preparation for her swallowing and enjoying a mini marshmallow. The following session, Emily attempted to renegotiate her marshmallow-to-exercise "contract." Clearly, Emily is learning a lot more than proper speech patterns!

Another client of the clinic has food-related therapy. Throughout the 1997–98 fiscal year, young Lance Hoover's sessions have been supported by the Pancake Breakfast Fund. Brethren and guests get a fine breakfast, and income from it helps Lance receive language therapy. Lance began therapy in October 1996 because he had a difficult time with the auditory processing of spoken language, a term called Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD). Lance also had trouble using language to express his thoughts and ideas. Over the course of therapy, Lance has shown tremendous improvements in his ability to comprehend auditory information. His organizational skills, such as identifying categories and sorting information into categories, have improved. These skills are important to building a framework for Lance's improved comprehension of auditory information. His ability to express thoughts and ideas has also improved through work on use of descriptive words and on identifying and describing objects using salient features.

Because the auditory processing of information is difficult for Lance, therapy also focused on listening to sounds during rhyming and on identifying beginning and ending sounds of words. These are skills which are important to later reading acquisition, and Lance has shown wonderful improvements in all these activities. Lance has made such excellent progress in his therapy that in July 1998 he proudly graduated from the speech/language therapy program and moved on to reading program through the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

These great strides in communication skills by Emily and Lance are grass-roots proof of how the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry is helping America's children.