My son received early intervention services with Mackenzie from 18-26 months, until we moved out of state. My son has suspected childhood apraxia of speech and Mackenzie was so wonderful working with him, collaborating with our entire family, introducing him to picture boards, new words and signs. Mackenzie also got us set up with an iPAD and speech generating application and guided us in using it in those early weeks before we moved. Mackenzie is knowledgeable and was so helpful with all of my son’s needs. She is kind and understanding and a wonderful therapist and advocate for our kids. I always felt comfortable asking her for help, advice, or to do something extra for my son, like making him another picture board for a new puzzle we got. Mackenzie always went above and beyond for us. Although my son still has a long way to go due to the nature of his speech disorder, I am forever thankful that early intervention services lead us to Mackenzie, and she is a part of my son’s journey. She truly cares about her clients and their families and is an amazing person and therapist.
Our family worked with Mackenzie when we were partnered together through Early Intervention Services. Mackenzie was so wonderful to work with. She’s extremely knowledgeable, caring and thorough in her approach as she works with children and their family members. A few highlights to share about Mackenzie that I truly valued:
She took the time to get to know our son by asking great questions. What are his likes? Where are his struggles? What concerns did our family have regarding his speech development? What methods have we tried in the past to encourage speech? This helped us structure and have impactful sessions where my son was highly engaged, having fun and getting the language reinforcement that he needed.
She also used our session time together to educate me as a parent. I learned an incredible amount from Mackenzie about speech development. Building this knowledge and awareness helped me to better support my son outside of our weekly scheduled appointments and reinforce positive speech behaviors and progress. She emailed many resources and documents, some of which I’ve utilized several times.
Sometimes, it’s easy for my son to lose focus or get distracted, but this didn’t worry Mackenzie and she adapted quickly. She was able to go with the flow and make any activity that my son wanted to do a moment to reinforce speech in a fun way.
When my son did start to show some problem behavior, Mackenzie helped us by thinking of speech activities to help change or prevent the behavior. She tailored our lessons in a way that what we were teaching my son could help him in other areas of his social and emotional development.
We feel so lucky to have worked with Mackenzie and miss her dearly! I would recommend her to any parent looking for more support for their toddler or child.
Mackenzie is an excellent SLP! Mackenzie has a wealth of knowledge, and an ability to communicate with children on their level. She is well-versed in the tools and methods to help children overcome their barriers and excel at language. Since starting speech therapy with Mackenzie, our daughter went from saying approximately 5-10 words, to now saying over 50+ words, and being able to express herself in a more productive way.
Mackenzie was excellent at involving us as parents, we helped create our daughter’s learning plan, and developed her weekly goals. Mackenzie always worked to center therapy around our family’s needs and routines. She scheduled our sessions at times convenient for us, and centered goals for our daughter around our most common activities and the words we needed our daughter to use the most to be able to more effectively communicate her wants and needs.
When our daughter was one year old, we became concerned that she was not saying any words. Our pediatrician said it was too early to worry, but referred us to speech therapy. Our daughter qualified and began working with speech therapy immediately. Our daughter is now three, and says over 50 words. Her personality has emerged and she has “come out of her shell.” She is able to better communicate her needs and is now becoming more social due to her increased confidence. Mackenzie used everyday activities, games, and other tools to help develop our daughter’s language. Mackenzie taught us as parents to use certain tools and approaches to help our daughter develop her speech in between our sessions. Mackenzie was very instrumental in teaching us how to help our daughter.
We could not recommend Mackenzie enough as a speech therapist. Not only did she make our daughter comfortable in the therapy setting and encourage her development and personality, but Mackenzie came to feel like part of the family. Our daughter looked forward to her sessions, and thrived under Mackenzie’s care and instruction. Our daughter gained so many skills, and so much confidence in addition to the development in her language. We could never thank Mackenzie enough for her caring, compassionate, and skilled instruction.
As first-time parents, our little the guy is the highlight of our lives. We considered all the advantages a quad-lingual household may provide in creative thinking, multi-tasking, appreciation of other cultures and future professional opportunities. However, we never considered the speech delay it may impose on his little developing self.
We contacted the County and after a long and painful process we were assigned Miss Mackenzie Welsh as our speech therapist.
In about 6 months, our hero went from having 30 words to over 180 and a dozen of 3 word sentences. Now, he talks a storm in 3 languages. Mackenzie’s caring and playful approach topped with her genuine love of children made a significant difference in our lives; it certainly curbed our son’s frustration that was getting translated into physical tension. Her attention to detail and high degree of knowledge quickly became valuable assets in turning the little guys passion for cars into a study mechanism that kept him focused, engaged and cooperative.
Her flexibility to our demanding schedules allowed us to complete the toddler program under her expert guidance where at many occasions we had to stage Mackenzie’s departure in an effort to avoid a crying scene. Yes, the little guy wanted her to stay much longer.
We are expecting our second one in August. If we encounter any speech assistance, we sure know who to keep on speed dial. I don’t think anyone is more qualified to work with my child(ren) more than Mackenzie whose passion of her profession and kids can be spotted from miles away.
MacKenzie Welsh is great with children. She is exceptional with helping my daughter with all her speech needs. Over the past year MacKenzie has not only help my daughter but she is a great influence for me by giving me tools to help my daughter as well. I would recommend her to anyone who needs help with speech development.
Mackenzie is so wonderful! She began seeing my son when he had only 1-2 true words and a few sounds at 19 months old. Kenzie worked with my son and our entire family and coached us on using strategies that helped my son find his voice. We used signs, pictures, a low-tech AAC device, then an iPAD with a speech generating application. My son made so much progress with Mackenzie and gained so many new sounds and words! I couldn’t believe my little boy who couldn’t express himself at all when we first started therapy, had made so much progress in such a short time! Kenzie really understood my son’s needs and worked with my family to meet our needs too and was just wonderful!
Mackenzie has been great with my daughter who has a speech delay. She knows her stuff! We found the methods that worked for my daughter and reached our goals easily. She went from speaking 1 word phrases to 3 and 4 word sentences. Highly recommend!
I had the pleasure of working with McKenzie(Kenzie) as my 4 year old son Kingston would call her…she was so patient and so gentle with him and was very good at keeping him engaged even though we were virtual…We started off a little rough because Kingston never had virtual sessions before, but she kept at it and eventually won him over and got him fully involved….Her methods of helping him to use his words and engaging in conversations were very effective I saw major improvements from when we started to when our sessions ended she made the speech sessions so fun that I think at times my son just thought he had a play date when in actuality she was getting the job done and doing so without any resistance from him. He looked forward to their sessions he asked about them outside his scheduled speech session window(Mom can you call Kenzie? lol)….I was very happy with her service she knew she was there to help me and always made me feel included in any and every decisions that had to do with his speech and the overall service she also worked with me on scheduling times that would work for both her and I….I would highly recommend Mckenzie Frees to any parents needing speech therapy for their little ones you will not be disappointed!!!
This testimonial is in reference to our time working with Mackenzie Welsh as a Speech-Language Pathologist for our 2-year old daughter.
We were introduced to Mackenzie through family after experiencing some speech and language struggles with our daughter. At the time, she had a vocabulary of a few words and was not progressing with her language as doctors and us as parents would have expected for her age. She also was experiencing very significant frustrations from not being able to communicate with us which led to behavioral breakdowns and tantrums. We were at the point where we wanted some intervention counseling and therapy for our daughter to get her on a path that would make her feel confident in her understanding and use of language.
In total, we worked with Mackenzie for around 4 months to create a strategic plan for how to get our daughter on the right path to expanding her language. Mackenzie is extremely professional, a knowledge expert, and truly loves kids, so working with her was above & beyond from what we expected. Mackenzie not only taught her, but us as parents, different techniques that we weren't aware of to practice with our daughter each week. The tools she gave to us were incredible and made us look at the way we were communicating with her in a very different way. At the end of each session, she would give us concrete examples and homework for us to work on over the next week. She helped give us the building blocks to better communication.
We could not recommend Mackenzie more for those in need of Speech and Language Therapy. Thanks to Mackenzie and her diligence with our daughter, she is currently on par with where she is expected to be. She's able to communicate clearly with us and express herself leaps and bounds to where she was at 6 months ago. We are so grateful for Mackenzie and her dedication to her work.