“If I just stim the speech sound and the child makes it, do I still need to do oral resting posture therapy?” To make that determination, analyze the child’s lips, tongue, and jaw and make sure they are in their optimum positions to facilitate good speech contacts.
The process of developing and establishing a child’s speech pattern may also be dependent on changing and establishing a new oral resting posture. The two are inextricably connected. Here's why....
What would you think of I said that “carryover”—one of the biggest challenges in our profession, and something we do toward the end of our therapy—is best addressed at the beginning and throughout therapy? Crazy? I don’t think so....
Coloring? Yes, coloring! Crayons even smell like childhood to me. And although coloring has taken a backseat to touch screen devices, kids still love to color. I say, bring out the coloring activities and crayons whenever you can.
Many of us look at a child and ask ourselves—knowingly or unknowingly--if the child's cranio-facial-nasal-oral differences are impacting his/her speech development and/or remediation? Hmmm....
Echo-reading a great technique to use in therapy--especially when you have a group of kids each with their own needs and goals. That scenario typically presents a bit of a challenge, but when doing this brand of “echo-reading” it’s a breeze!
No time to create helpful (and fun) Halloween activities for your language kids? You have one now! This week, I’ve created language activities around one of the “Scary Tales.”
“Th” looks easy to say and remediate, but it isn’t. Once a substituted movement pattern has been established, it’s difficult to replace. But not impossible!
Puh-tuh-kuh is making a come-back! Actually for me, it never really left. I've always like doing repetitive syllable analysis with my therapy-kids because I glean so much information from it. Here's a new twist on an old favorite to analyze mouth movements.
On The Speech Link, Anna Vagin shared techniques for social learning using YouTube animations; love it. Then I asked her to share her favorite “therapy nugget.” Wow, it was really good. Then, I remembered my recent interview with Pat Mervine, and she said the same thing....
Do you have a first grader (or even a third grader) that says /t/ for /k/ and /d/ for /g/? Seems like there's always one child that hangs on to his/her fronting and won’t let go. Frequently, they're tough to remediate. But it is possible, and here's how....
I’ve frequently shared this in my seminars, but very rarely in print. I've promised to share more on Solidification and how to nail-down oral movement patterns. This is it. And wow, it is helpful.
I love hearing my language-kids talk. But when we’re sitting there drilling-and-instilling past tense, and Johnny interjects a story about his trip to his grandma’s last weekend and says, “We drived to Atlanta last Saturday,” I wanna beat my head against the wall! So, what’s an SLP do?
Most of us SLPs struggle to get our therapy-kids to do their homework. We know that extra practice time outside of therapy can really help. But, just because we give it to them, doesn’t mean they do it. Right? Perhaps you’ve made a decision to emphasize homework this year....
Today’s topic: Organization. There’s therapy-room organization (lowercase) that focuses on our stuff. Then there’s therapy room ORGANIZATION (uppercase) that focuses on YOU and is designed to SUPPORT YOU. Let me explain….