Unsupervised

There were the sounds of three children laughing, giggling, playing, and talking.

There was the sound of macaroni rattling around which was to be expected given that they were playing in our macaroni sensory bin.

There was the moment early on when I peeked around the corner to see two of the three children actually sitting in the bin together - adorable.

There was the half an hour of completely uninterrupted adult conversation I was able to have with a friend.

There was the sound of three pairs of feet thundering up the stairs as they moved on to another activity.

And then I walked back around that corner and found this...

Totally worth it!

Speech-Language Pathology Topics: Choosing Targets - An Example

Speech-Language Pathologists have lots of tools available to them. One example is picture card sets that focus on a specific sounds like the ones I have been making and sharing here. However, it is not always appropriate to work on a specific sound with a child even when they are having trouble with that sound. That's when the experience and professional judgement of the SLP comes into play. I'll give you an example.

Let's take the final /b/ sound as a example. An SLP has two apraxic children both of whom are struggling with the final /b/ sound. That SLP also has a set of cards that focuses on the final /b/ sound. For Child A, using that card deck would be very appropriate, and for Child B it would not be her best choice. Why?

Child A: Child A is 2 1/2 years old. She isn't really talking at all and has only two "words" in her vocabulary /ma/ for "more" and /da/ for "that" which she uses for everything else. She struggles to even imitate sounds. Through informal assessment, the SLP has determined that /b/ is one of the only sounds that Child A is stimulable for. Child A has an easier time imitating /b/ in final position than in initial position. This would be a perfect time to work on the final /b/ sound and using a final /b/ card deck would be one way to work on it.

Child B: Child B is also 2 1/2 years old. Child B is doing a lot of talking, but it is difficult to understand anything she says because of the high numbers of speech errors. Child B can make most of the early emerging consonant sounds (/p, b, t, d, m, n, h/) and a few of the sounds that tend to emerge next (/s, sh, w/). One of the speech errors that is having the biggest impact on this child's speech is her tendency to leave final consonants off of words. With this child the final /b/ is not going to the the therapist's top priority. She would probably focus on final consonant production using voiceless, early emerging consonants because those specific sounds are the least complex in terms of motor processing. Final /b/ would not be included because it is a voiced sound.

Summary An SLP working with a child who has a severe speech disorder has more potential targets than there is time to work on. The SLP will use her expertise, professional judgement, and assessment of the child's current skill level and needs to determine which targets are most important at any given time.

You might also be interested in the following articles:

Voicing Pairs

Random Example of the Complexity of Motor Planning

Rory's Story Cubes: Review

This is my glowing review of Rory's Story Cubes. I am not affiliated with Rory's Story Cubes or Amazon in any way. I am simply telling you about these because I think they are really cool.

The idea is super simple. The entire game consists of nine dice. Each die has a different picture on every side. You roll the dice and make up a story prompted by the pictures. You'd think this would be way over the head of a two and three year old, but they loved it. They were entranced for at least half an hour. Ok. Fine, my two year old got bored after 15 minutes and then just wanted to hoard some of the die and play with them independently, but still. Together, we made up at least 10 stories during our half hour of play.

This would be a great little tool to have around for therapy. For language it is a great prompt for making up short stories. For speech, you could choose specific pictures that have your target sounds in them and have them make up phrases or sentences using those words. Great for generalization and you can't beat the price.