I’ve worked with children of all ages with and without disabilities for over 18 years as a day camp and sleep away camp counselor, respite care worker, tutor, volunteer, and the last 10 years professionally, in NYC, as a speech language therapist.

Madison is actually a surprisingly progressive liberal city and an epicenter for academic research. Sophomore year, an interesting class entitled Introduction to Communicative Disorders piqued my curiosity. Not knowing anything about speech language pathology, I signed up and became instantly hooked. Dr. Julia Evans, who taught the course, became my mentor for the next four years, and she introduced me to Dr. Seth Pollak, who I worked with for three years. Before you could say abracadabra, I was in grad school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the top programs in the country for speech language pathology. While there I conducted the following:

I started my clinical fellowship and later working with children of all ages (babies through adolescents) with varying learning needs. Speech, language, and feeding therapy? Check. Reading and writing intervention? Check. Socials skills remediation? Check. My experiences working in early intervention in families’ homes and at a school in Queens plus working as an independent contractor for the Board of Education, with preschool and school age students, have led me to work with a diversity of family cultures and backgrounds. I also have training and experience with Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), a type of therapy used with children diagnosed on the autism spectrum.

worked as a pediatric speech language pathologist at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital’s Therapeutic Nursery division of Child Psychiatry. Here, I taught (along with a special education teacher, social worker, and a teacher’s assistant) at a nursery with caregivers and their children incorporating an interdisciplinary model of teaching (each family was assigned a psychiatrist who we collaborated with weekly).

I started giving talks to parents, professionals, and schools about early childhood speech and language delays. That same year I also collaborated with a yoga instructor, Marty New, creator of Climb Time Yoga. We developed a curriculum incorporating contemporary scientific research on healthy cognitive and language development with unique yoga partnering exercises; enhancing emotional, social, and communication bonds between parent and child.

I started working as a learning specialist for a Montessori school (toddlers through 6th grade) in Manhattan as a learning specialist. Here I worked one on one and in the classroom helping students with speech, language, and learning difficulties and I collaborated with their teachers.

Wanting to be closer to my Park Slope hood, I opened Brooklyn Letters in the summer of 2010. Stop by my office and introduce yourself! Don’t live in the neighborhood? Don’t worry, my team can probably travel to your home.

I was featured on About.com explaining and modeling six techniques to facilitate early childhood speech and language development and I was later filmed by About.com demonstrating how to teach sight words (reading development).

I presented my first international lecture along with Sarah Stuntebeck, Brooklyn Letters speech language therapist, to a preschool, The Study, (emphasizes learning through play) in New Delhi, India.

Along with my business partner, Dr. Blythe Grossberg, we opened up a tutoring company, for all ages, offering tutoring in all core subjects, including services for those with learning differences, test preparation e.g. SAT, regents, SHSAT, etc and adult learning services. What distinguishes our company from the competition is that our tutors are professionals with rigorous academic and professional training in fields related to learning and learning differences.
www.ThembaTutors.com

October 2012, attended a full day introductory workshop, lectured by Dr. Sally Rogers, at the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain.