VOICE FOR EVERYONE | Share your voice with KSHB 41's Grant Stephens
An Overland Park man has created a game to help develop speech and diction skills after struggling to speak following his own traumatic brain injury.
It's taken shape as a card game, named Word Whizzes, made by Noah Weaver.
Each card is a tongue-twisting-tool to help that link between mouth and mind.
A link severed violently for Weaver a few years ago.
"It was a serious enough crash that they were not sure if I'd made it," he said.
A car wreck led to traumatic brain injury, which stole his voice and made it difficult for him to move on his own.
"I had full knowledge in my brain what the word was supposed to be, but it just wouldn't happen," he said.
Rachel Lindstedt, Weaver's speech language therapist, talked about his recovery.
"He had difficulty accurately and precisely motor planning the movements to be able to say everything that he wanted to say," Lindstedt said.
Weaver talked about some of the techniques used.
"One thing she really worked with me with was my pronunciation and my diction," he said. "And to do that, she had me working with all the classic tongue twisters."
Weaver said, "I thought to myself, 'I could make a game out of that. That'd be cool ... we could make it fun.'"
So he wrote his own. Not just as part of his own recovery, which it was, but for others in their speech development journey.
It's a new tool — a new game parents and language therapists can use — made by someone who knows what a lost voice is like.
"He has kind of used what he went through, a very traumatic life-changing event to turn something, make something positive out of it," she said.
Maybe it's for a kid working on enunciation, maybe it's someone else recovering lost speech, maybe it'll help them too.
Those interested in contacting Lindstedt can reach him at redraspberrypublishing@gmail.com.
—
