Kieran and Alice Fitzsimons are the husband and wife duo who founded Pippin! The inspiration behind the app is solely based on their personal experience of having a child with a speech delay. They want to help other parents so others don’t feel as lost and alone as they once did. Through Pippin they provide a range of activities and resources which promote speech and language development.
Leo is Kieran and Alice’s son who has a speech delay. When Leo was first confirmed as having a speech delay it was a very daunting and worrying time as parents. We didn’t really know what it meant or what it meant for Leo’s future. Initially it was tricky to identify his speech delay due to lack of socialising with others due to Covid-19. We found very little support early on about what we could do to help Leo and had to wait 6 months to be seen by the NHS speech and language department. In these 6 months, if we had the relevant information, we could have been helping him at home. To help other parents and children navigate their speech journey we decided to create Pippin.
Alice and Kieran had difficulty finding readily available information to help improve Leo’s speech but through a lot of searching, they discovered and created a set of assets which helped Leo’s speech develop. Pippin is an amalgamation of books, games, activities and resources to help other parents with a speech delayed child.
Here are a few examples of what to expect in the app:
Word Tracker:
When speaking with professionals about Leo’s speech one of the first questions was usually how many words he can say. When you are put on the spot it is so difficult to count in your head how many words he had. I ended up keeping a draft email and adding words to it when he had mastered a new word. However this became tricky to do because often words were duplicated and I would have to manually count the number of words listed. To make this easier for others we have created a simple way to track your child’s word which can be exported into a report and printed for appointments. The tracker enables you to add words, sentences and provides information on core words that are recommended to teach your child first.
Games:
Once we had the knowledge of what we needed to do to help Leo with his speech at home the next challenge was finding suitable activities to do with him. This took a lot of trial and error to find the right types of activities which engaged Leo and were suitable for speech.
Books:
When first speaking with professionals about speech they often advise doing lots of reading at home. We feel they should expand this advice to say to use books which are repetitive. We saw this gave Leo familiarity and after time he tried to join in with the bits he knew.
You Choose is a brilliant book to promote conversation between you and your child, giving them the opportunity to interact with the content. This is one of Leo’s favourite book’s and we have purchased another one in the series.
We are so happy that we have been able to create a platform that will hopefully make your child’s speech journey that little bit easier. Come and check out all the resources on the Pippin app, downloadable from the App Store and Google Play store.
We hope Pippin helps your child find their voice.