A Note from Sarah
Hi! I’m Sarah. I’m an early intervention teacher. I’ve been working with infants and toddlers with developmental delays since 2010, coaching parents and caregivers to use evidence-based strategies to help foster their little ones’ communication, motor, social emotional, adaptive, and cognitive development.
While I enjoy supporting children and their families in all of these skill areas, I’m especially passionate about speech and language development.
I truly think that I have the best job in the world. I love babies and toddlers, but the real reason I love my job is actually the parents. Why? Because parents never cease to amaze me.
Parents love their children with an intensity that is unlike any other force. I love collaborating with parents to see what strengths they are already bringing to the table and then determining what strategies we can try next to help their kiddos to gain new skills.
When you combine the intensity of a parent’s love with strategies at that “just right” level for the individual child, that’s when the magic happens.
It isn’t actually magic…it’s science. But it sure feels magical when parents and I discuss and try out a strategy together, and then their child says their first word. It’s a feeling unlike any other and the reason that I love what I do.
In 2019, I started to daydream about an idea to take the speech and language strategies that I coach parents to use everyday and then weave those strategies into music for communication. I soon found myself humming melodies and coming up with lyrics in the car as I drove between homes and childcares.
I wanted these speech and language songs to go much deeper than nursery rhymes. I knew that they needed to model the kinds of highly functional words that little ones need to build their vocabularies.
And they had to sound different from nursery rhymes. I knew that if I was going to make songs for speech, they had to be catchy enough for parents to be able to enjoy listening alongside their children.
I had just started recording my first couple of speech songs when the pandemic hit. I was suddenly trying to work from home with a four-year-old and a two-year-old.
I held on to my dream, but I pushed it to the back burner as time went on. We moved…twice. I had a miscarriage, followed by the birth of a beautiful rainbow baby. We were back to sleepless nights, learning how to do zone defense with three small children.
One night in early 2023, I realized that there was never really going to be a “better” time to try to create speech therapy songs. So I got to work, and I had so much fun along the way.
My dream became a reality in April of 2024 with the release of Speak up and Dance. I am so excited to empower parents and caregivers everywhere with communication songs and strategies for their children’s speech and language development. I’m excited to finally share this music with other early intervention teachers and with speech-language pathologists looking for fresh, fun music for speech therapy.