Carly Axani SLP

Carly Axani SLP Hi! I'm Carly! I am a Registered Speech-Language Pathologist who has been working with children and their families for over 10 years.

I offer fun, functional and family-centered SLP services for children in the Edmonton area.

09/04/2026

Your child may not be giving you their worst. They may be giving you what they have left. ❤️

All day long, that little brain has been working.

Listening. Remembering. Inhibiting. Transitioning. Problem-solving. Reading the room. Following directions. Finding words. Managing emotions. Keeping track of belongings. Figuring out what comes next.

That’s a LOT of language, cognitive load + executive functioning for a developing brain. Core executive functions include working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility, and these skills are still developing throughout childhood. 

So when your child walks through the door and falls apart because you cut their toast incorrectly…

Maybe they don’t need another demand.

Maybe they need a snack without 14 follow-up questions.

Movement. Quiet. Predictability. Connection. Play.

And maybe tonight, “home reading” looks like cuddling together while you read the book. Or listening to an audiobook while they colour or build LEGO.

That isn’t giving up on literacy. Shared book reading provides meaningful opportunities for vocabulary and language learning, and research supports its role in children’s receptive and expressive language development.  Audiobooks can similarly provide access to rich language and vocabulary. 

Sometimes the best thing we can do after a cognitively demanding day isn’t squeeze in one. more. thing.

It’s give their brain somewhere safe to land. ❤️

Save this for the first few weeks of school—and send it to the parent whose “angel at school” is currently crying because the granola bar broke in half. 😂

References:
Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168.
Dowdall, N., et al. (2020). Shared picture book reading interventions for child language development: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Child Development, 91(2), e383–e399.
Flack, Z. M., Field, A. P., & Horst, J. S. (2018). The effects of shared storybook reading on word learning: A meta-analysis. Developmental Psychology, 54(7), 1334–1346.

08/26/2026

If your child can read JUMP…but not BUMP, we need to talk. 👀📚

Recognizing a familiar word and being able to decode a new one are not necessarily the same skill.

The goal of phonics instruction isn’t to help children memorize thousands of words.

It’s to teach them the alphabetic code so they can apply what they know to words they’ve never seen before.

JUMP → BUMP → LUMP → STUMP

And yes, this is exactly why we sometimes ask kids to read ridiculous fake words like VOP. 😂

No picture.
No context.
No memorized word.

They have to use the code.

With phonemic awareness, explicit phonics instruction, successful decoding, and repeated encounters, words eventually become stored for rapid retrieval through orthographic mapping. 🧠✨

That’s how we move toward automatic word recognition.

So the question isn’t just:

“Can they read this word?”

It’s:

“Can they use what they’ve learned to read a word they’ve never seen before?”

THAT is transfer. 🤓

📚 Nerdy reading: Ehri (2014); Share (1995); Castles, Rastle, & Nation (2018).

SAVE this one for the next time you’re wondering why your child’s teacher or SLP is asking them to read fake words. 😂 And SHARE with a parent who needs this A-ha!

08/21/2026

And I’ve seen them all this week 🫠

08/19/2026

Sometimes the skill I’m targeting isn’t the one you can hear yet. ❤️

Speech-sound therapy is SO much more than:

“Watch my mouth.”
“Say /k/.”
“Try again.”

To learn a new speech sound, a child needs opportunities to engage, share attention, notice cues, imitate, persist through difficulty, tolerate mistakes, and try again.

And sometimes those are the skills we need to build FIRST.

Because if a child is overwhelmed, dysregulated, or doesn’t yet feel safe enough to engage with me, simply providing more repetitions or more cues isn’t necessarily better therapy.

So sometimes speech therapy looks like:

Playing.
Moving.
Laughing.
Building trust.
Practising transitions.
Learning to tolerate “not yet.”
Trying once and discovering that getting it wrong is safe.

That isn’t time away from therapy.

It IS therapy.

We build connection.
We scaffold regulation and engagement.
We create opportunities for successful practice.

And THEN we ask that little motor system to do something brand new. 🧠👄

Because the goal isn’t simply to get 100 productions of a sound.

It’s to create the conditions in which a child can actually learn.

📚 Nerdy reading: Maas et al. (2008), American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology; Karver et al. (2018), Psychotherapy; Hamovitch et al. (2019), International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.

✨ SAVE this for the day you’re wondering why your child’s speech therapy looks so much like play, and SHARE it with an SLP who understands the work underneath the work.

ChildDevelopment SLP TalkNerdyToM

08/18/2026

“They’re making connections to the text.” 📚🧠

Okay…but what does that actually mean? 🤓

Reading comprehension doesn’t happen from the words on the page alone.

Our brains are constantly connecting what we’re reading to what we already know.

That’s background knowledge.

And here’s the piece I LOVE:

✨ You can’t activate knowledge that isn’t there.

Before reading, we can ask:
“What do you already know about this topic?”

But we should ALSO be asking:

“What does this text assume my child already knows?”

If that knowledge is missing, BUILD IT.

Look at pictures.
Teach the vocabulary.
Watch a short video.
Read some nonfiction.
Talk about the concept.
Then read.

Because sometimes a child’s comprehension difficulty isn’t a strategy problem.

It’s a knowledge problem.

And this is why experiences matter so much for literacy, too.

Zoos. Baking. Nature walks. Museums. Travel. Grocery shopping. Ridiculously long conversations in the car. 😂

It all becomes language, vocabulary and knowledge about the world that children can eventually bring to the texts they read.

The words are on the page.

But comprehension happens when those words connect to what’s already in the brain. 🧠✨

📚 Nerdy reading: Recht & Leslie (1988); Cervetti & Wright (2020); Cabell & Hwang (2020); Duke & Cartwright (2021).

SAVE this one for your next read-aloud and SHARE it with an educator who loves getting nerdy about literacy. 🤓📚

08/14/2026

Your child can be eligible for kindergarten AND not be ready for kindergarten yet. Both things can be true. 🤍

In Alberta, a child who turns 5 by December 31 can start kindergarten that September. That means some children enter at four years old, learning alongside classmates who may be nearly a full year older.

And when you’ve only been alive for four years?

Twelve months is a LOT of development.

Language.
Self-regulation.
Attention.
Executive functioning.
Fine-motor skills.
Social confidence.
Independence.
Early literacy.

Research on the relative-age effect shows that the youngest children in a grade can experience disadvantages compared with their older classmates, although these effects are generally small and vary considerably from child to child.

This is NOT me saying every September–December baby should wait.

It’s me saying:

Kindergarten eligibility is determined by a birthday. Kindergarten readiness is determined by the CHILD.

And if your gut is telling you, “I think another year would be good for them,” you are allowed to explore that option.

Another year isn’t necessarily “holding them back.”

It can simply mean giving development more time.

📣 Educators, parents, grandparents, aunties and friends: SHARE this with the family of a September, October, November or December baby.

There may be a parent in your life agonizing over this decision who doesn’t even know waiting is an option.

📚 Nerdy references: Rose & Barlow (2024), British Journal of Educational Psychology; NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (2007), Early Education and Development; Simpson, Chevalier, & Booth (2026), Developmental Science.

08/13/2026

“What happened in the story?” isn’t a bad question. But PLEASE don’t stop there. 🤓📚

Who? What? Where? often ask children to retrieve information that’s explicitly stated.

But when we ask:

🧠 Why did that happen?
🧠 How do you think they felt?
🧠 How do you know?
🧠 What clues helped you figure that out?
🧠 What do you think will happen next—and why?

…we’re asking their brains to do something much more sophisticated.

They have to combine text clues + background knowledge to construct meaning.

Hello, inferencing. 👋

And here’s the SLP piece: you don’t have to wait until a child can independently read to build reading comprehension.

Inferencing starts in oral language.

Read aloud. Tell stories. Watch longer narratives together. Pause and wonder aloud. And when your child doesn’t know the answer?

Don’t just keep asking the question. Teach them HOW to answer it.

Make your invisible thinking visible:

“Hmm…they didn’t tell us. What clues can we find?”

✨ We’re not just teaching children to remember what they read.

We’re teaching them how to THINK about what they read.

And THAT is comprehension.

📚 Nerdy references: Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant (2004); Elleman (2017); Duke & Cartwright (2021); National Reading Panel (2000).

StructuredLiteracy SLP LiteracyInstruction

08/12/2026

If spelling were only about sounding words out… explain CHOCOLATE. 🍫🤓

For many English speakers, chocolate is pronounced with just two syllables: CHOC-lət.

So why all those letters?

Because English spelling represents more than sound.

Phonology matters. A LOT. Explicit, systematic phonics instruction is foundational to learning to read and spell.

But as children become more sophisticated readers and writers, they also need to understand that our writing system carries information about:

🧠 Phonology — how words sound
🧩 Morphology — how meaningful word parts work
🌎 Etymology — where words came from and how they changed

This is why I LOVE when a child asks:

“But WHY is it spelled like that?”

Instead of “English is weird,” we can investigate.

Because sometimes a spelling that looks completely random makes a whole lot more sense once you know its story.

✨ “Sound it out” is foundational. But it can only take spelling so far.

Teach the sounds.
Teach the patterns.
Teach the meaning.
And teach kids the WHY.

📚 Nerdy reading: Ehri (2014); Moats (2020); Bowers & Bowers (2017); Venezky (1999).

Phonics Spelling LiteracyInstruction SLP

08/07/2026

Who knew I was an artist? 👩‍🎨

08/07/2026

Your child knows the sounds…so why can’t they read the word?! 🤯

Knowing individual letter-sound correspondences and blending those phonemes together are different skills.

And sometimes, when blending isn’t clicking, the answer isn’t MORE practice.

It’s better scaffolding.

One of my favourite strategies? Continuous blending.

Instead of:

/s/ — /t/ — /ŏ/ — /p/

Try stretching and connecting the sounds:

ssssstŏp → STOP

And get nerdy about the words you choose. 🤓

Sounds like /s/, /f/, /m/, /n/, /l/ can be prolonged, making them easier to connect without breaking the acoustic information apart.

Stop sounds like /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/ can’t.

So when a child is learning to blend, intentionally choosing words with continuous sounds can reduce the difficulty of the task. As they become successful, we gradually increase the complexity.

And if the whole word is still too much?

Chunk it.

/st/ + /ŏp/ → STOP

This is what good intervention looks like: not simply repeating the same task until a child gets it, but adjusting the task to provide just enough scaffolding for success—and then gradually removing that support.

✨ Don’t just drill harder. Scaffold smarter.

📚 Nerdy references: National Reading Panel (2000); Foorman et al. (2016), IES Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade; Ehri et al. (2001).

StructuredLiteracy ReadingIntervention EarlyLiteracy SLP LiteracyIntervention

Address

6105 Currents Drive NW
Southwest Edmonton, AB
T6W2Z4

Telephone

+17808504327

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