SLPs and Isolation - A Thing of the Past

It took me three years to complete my masters program in speech language pathology because my bachelor's degree and first masters were in different areas. It took three very full years to absorb the vast amount of information necessary to become certified as an SLP. The program must cover the basics to prepare you to work in a wide variety of settings. One SLP might work in a nursing home helping patients with swallowing problems, dementia, and aphasia among other things. Another SLP might work in a hospital settings with trachs and vents, premature babies, or stroke victims (among other things). SLPs are found in the schools and in private clinics working with children who have a wide variety of speech and language needs. The scope of material that must be covered in an SLP program is huge. They also must train you in basic clinical competence in a variety of settings with a variety of client disorders. It is an intense program.

Then, when you get your first job, you are assigned a mentor and you must complete a clinical fellowship year with that mentor before you get your clinical certificate of competence. And then you are on your own. When I graduated in 1999 I worked in the schools. In that setting, you are often the only SLP in your school. Often, you are the only SLP in 2-3 schools. At that time, there weren't really any SLP blogs or websites. ASHA didn't have a huge online presence. There was no Facebook or Pinterest. I remember feeling so isolated.

There were inservice days that brought all the SLPs in the district together, however those days were tightly scheduled according to an agenda that involved continuing education or procedural updates and didn't allow for much unstructured discussion. I remember desperately wanting time to simply talk with other professionals about my students. I had my first student with childhood apraxia of speech and I didn't feel I was doing enough to help her. I had a little girl with a severe fluency problem that I wasn't making much progress on. Did anyone have any really good strategies for sharpening up a lateral lisp? I wanted to trade creative ideas on how to make articulation therapy interesting. Or I would make some materials and not have anyone to share them with.

Today it is such a different world. I no longer feel isolated. If I want to see amazing things other SLPs are doing I can find them on Pinterest or by reading any number of SLP blogs. If I make my own materials I can share them myself on my own blog and know that I'm helping other professionals and parents. It is easy to keep up with ASHA's professional journals in the member section of their website. I can keep up with other sources of research in my areas of interest easily online. It helps me to be so much more creative and better at my profession. It would be pretty amazing to be starting out in this profession today with so many resources available at any computer with an internet connection and I highly recommend these types of resources to any practicing SLP today.


For example, start here:

1. Go to the Pediastaff Pinterest Board on Articulation and click on any picture/idea that looks interesting to you. That should take you to the original blog where Pediastaff found the idea. Then explore that person's blog for other ideas you like.
2. Check out other Pediastaff pinterest boards on other topics (language and grammar, early intervention, apraxia, and many more).
3. Alternately, begin again with any pinterest board that interests you and choose a pin you like. Look at the list of people that have repinned that pin to their own board. Many of those people are SLPs and have boards of all the SLP ideas they like. You can browse those boards and see collections of ideas that appeal to other SLPs. It's a rabbit hole. If you get started, you'll find hours slipping away from you, but I guarantee you'll come out of it inspired.

DIY: Use Home Improvement Sprinkler System to Make Kids Water Playground

Home improvement stores sell component based sprinkler systems. You buy some hose, connectors and valves. Choose some cool sprinkler heads. Then hook the whole thing up to your hose.

In our case, my husband installed a splitter down on the hose faucet so he'll still be able to hook up a regular garden hose and then ran the sprinkler system hose up to the deck level. He attached the hose under the deck rail. I just made that sound simple, but it did take him several hours. Then he pierced holes (with a special tool) in the hose and installed a smaller hose with a valve and sprinkler head every few feet along the deck. With the valves, the children can turn each sprinkler head on and off individually. We also left two of the smaller hoses free flowing and called them kid faucets. They can open the valves and use them to fill cups, make "water snakes", spray each other (neck down), or anything else that suits their imagination. There is also a master valve they can use to turn the entire thing on and off at will.

Hopefully the pictures will give you an idea. We got it up and running today. The children had so much fun. I intend to send the children out to play every day this summer in the morning when the deck is in the shade. I'll simply send them out in clothes that I don't mind getting wet. They will be able to play in the sprinklers whenever they like, and use the "kid faucets" whenever they like as well.

Speech Steps from Isolation to Spontaneous Sentences

This is a description of the variety of ways you can use the exact same set of stimuli to work with children who are at vastly different levels of proficiency with a target sound. Or, alternately, a description of the set of incremental steps you can go through using the same set of stimuli to take a child from producing a sound in isolation to using that same sound in spontaneous sentences. For the purposes of this discussion, I am using the /s/ phoneme as an example, but the same process can be used with any phoneme.

At the beginning of the spectrum, you have a child who is stimulable for the target sound, but is having difficulty at the CV, VC, or CVC single-syllable word level. At the end of the spectrum, you have a child who is ready to work on carryover to conversational speech with the sound. Let's look at the steps you can take with the same set of stimuli to vary difficulty to meet the child's needs.

I attempted to get this information down in paragraph form, but it was too wordy. An illustrated flowchart seemed to work better, so here it is. You might consider printing this and attaching it to a copy of one or two of my free articulation card sets and sending it home as homework for the summer with students.

Speech Steps from Isolation to Spontaneous Sentences