The Weekly Review: Week 76

SLP Resource of the Week

Rebecca at Adventures in Speech Pathology has put together a great beginning of the school year post on 10 Things You Need for Articulation Therapy. The post lists the 10 things along with links to free resources she found browsing the web to give you materials in the 10 areas. I particularly liked the beautiful, accurate informational handout on the hierarchy of speech therapy Rebecca linked to in #3 from Mommy Speech Therapy.

Ava this Week

As we were walking to school one day this week, we came across some art that had obviously been traced into the setting concrete by some adolescent males. Ava stopped, entranced by the foot long line drawing of male genitalia before her. Then she excitedly shouted, "Look Mama! Someone drew scissors on the sidewalk!" I sure was grateful she interpreted that picture as scissors especially given that she decided to shout her observations to everyone walking by on the street.

Weekly Michael

Michael is a conservative soul who tends to learn well from his mistakes - sometimes too well. He was trying to keep up with his running sister one day on the way to school and fell, scraping the palms of his hands. I helped him up and comforted him. The next day, as he could tell Ava was gearing up for another spontaneous run, he cautioned the family, "Now, we can't run anymore on sidewalks because we can fall and scrape our hands." I haven't been able to persuade him to run again. He'll discontentedly watch Ava and I run ahead, but refuses to break out of his conservative, safe pace even as the distance between us lengthens. I don't know how to encourage/reassure him. I worry about that boy sometimes.

Weekly Weight Loss

This week I'm down 1.6. Taking last week's bump up into consideration, that's an average weight loss of a little less than half a pound over the past two weeks. Given that we had out of town guests for an extended weekend and a couple of extravagant meals here and there I'll consider this a win. It's nice to be back on track though.

I've also started walking the kids to school in the morning weather permitting. I spend 30-35 minutes (round-trip) walking and so that adds some consistent activity to my routine. We usually have a great time. We examine rocks and flowering vines. We talk about the dewdrops shining in the sunlight. We say hello to the construction workers setting up for their day's work patching the road. We discuss sparing the lives of the bugs on the sidewalk rather than squishing them. We discuss and practice staying aware of the traffic around us and safe street crossing procedures. All in all, it's much better family time than driving.

This Week's Special Event

I'm beginning to have senior moments. (And I'm not all that "senior" as my 40th birthday is still well on the horizon.) I typed out this section heading with something in particular in mind and then promptly forgot what I was intending to write about. Let me just say - that is darned irritating. Oh well, sorry about that. :-)

Have a great weekend everyone!

Thank You Volunteers (A Sneak Preview Thank You)

I wanted to sincerely thank everyone who commented or emailed me offering to help proofread my new book. I got far more offers than I needed. I've already contacted the people who sent in the first few offers and I don't need any more volunteers for now.

Here's a sneak preview of just a few of the 53 reproducible /s/ resources you'll find in the book.

Once I get some feedback, I'll make any corrections necessary and make the book available. I'll be sure to keep everyone updated.

Review: Articulation Scenes by Smarty Ears - iPad App

Articulation Scenes iPad App by Smarty Ears: A Review

An evaluation copy of this app was provided to me for free. I was not otherwise compensated for this review.

Detailed Description

Smarty Ears is offering their Articulation Scenes app for $34.99 at the app store. This app allows you to create profiles for multiple children. When you hit "Play" you choose the name of the student you are working with and then the phoneme (p, m, h, w, n, b, d, y, t, k, g, ng, f, ch, j, l, r, v, s, z, sh, and th). Once you identify the phoneme you wish to target you can choose a scene to work with. The scene is a picture filled with items that feature that phoneme. M, N, B, D, T, K, G, F, CH, V, Z, SH, and TH(voiced and voiceless combined) all have Initial, Medial, and Final scenes available. P has I, M, and two F scenes. H and Y have only an initial scene. NG has M and two F scenes. L has I, M, F, and an L-Blends scene. S has I, M, F, SK, SP, and ST. R has M, F, Pre-Vocalic R, and separate scenes for 6 of the vocalic R sounds.

Once you've chosen a scene, you can choose one of four activities to do with that scene: Find the Hidden Items, Tap and Say It, The Movie Theater, and The Production Room. If your iPad is connected to a wireless printer, there is also a simple homework document associated with each scene that features the target word pictures from that scene.

The Find the Hidden Items game simply lists the target words across the bottom of the page. The child can tap on the word to have it read to them. Then they search for that item on the page and tap on it. Once they find it, that target word disappears from the bottom of the screen and is replaced by another until all the words are found. This activity has no data tracking mechanism. You'll have to track accuracy on your own on a separate piece of paper.

In the Tap and Say It activity tapping on one of the target items brings up a popup that shows a picture of the target word and produces a model. After the child says the word (or you can choose to record it with your iPad) you can choose missed it, almost, or got it for data tracking purposes. Then when you back out, you can go to that child's progress report and see a record of the activity and the percentages of correct/almost/incorrect for that activity. You might find it more useful to think of the "Missed It" category as omission, the "Almost" category as substitution/distortion (whichever applies to that particular student/phoneme, and "Correct" as correct. That data scheme would be more useful.

The Movie Theater activity shows the scene while reading a story that incorporates all the target words. As far as I can tell, this is simply a passive listening activity.

The final activity is The Production Room. In this activity, the child is prompted to make up their own story about the scene and record it, or to read a script of the pre-prepared story about that scene. Then they can listen to the recording of themselves telling a story about the scene. There is no data collection mechanism for this activity.

Pros, Cons, and Bottom Line

This app includes a lot of target phonemes with the pictures incorporated into scenes that provide context and facilitate sentence level productions and generalization and carryover. The scenes are attractive and children will particularly enjoy finding the hidden pictures. If a set of 72 scenes with over 1500 target picture words is worth $34.99 to you, then you've already made a decision.

Many of the target words are fairly complex in syllable structure, so this app might not be best suited for working with children with more severe delays. For example, the stimuli for initial /p/ are: pig, pie, plate, pear, parcel, pot, pen, pin, pearl, pencil, paper, purse, pizza, peace, paint, pole, purple, pink, paint, pants, and pliers. Only 7/21 are simple CV or CVC words. All the others contain vocalic-r, consonant blends, or are two-syllable. Also, within app data tracking is minimal so be prepared to track performance separately. In my opinion, these are the major disadvantages of this program.

Here's my bottom line. If you are working with straightforward artic students who do not need a lot of single-syllable, simple syllable shape stimuli and don't mind keeping your data separately, this app might be worth the price. The scenes are great for keeping interest and for facilitation of carryover and generalization. If you are working with children who need simpler stimuli, you are likely to be frustrated with the composition of the targets included in the scenes and you would probably be better off looking elsewhere for stimuli for therapy.