“Why do I go to speech?”

Incorporating executive functions in your articulation therapy improves carryover of skills.

As a speech-language therapist, it’s important to ask yourself:

• Do my students know what sounds they work on?
• Could they tell me the steps required to correctly produce their sounds?
• And, most importantly:

Do they even know WHY they come to speech?

This is a problem I’ve seen in the field for years and I’ve made it my mission to help students better understand the purpose of speech therapy and empower them with the skills to help carryover the progress they make in our sessions to their everyday life.

I’ve been surprised to see how even children as young as 4 can really benefit from explicitly teaching the purpose and steps to correctly produce their target speech sounds. After educating the student and helping them take more ownership of their goals in therapy, I’ve seen students meet their goals much quicker and improve overall speech intelligibility much faster than the traditional “drill and kill” approach.

Try incorporating executive functioning activities in your articulation therapy and see how much more progress your students make! I begin and end each session with a brief review of the student’s target sounds (no more than 2 sounds each session) and have them learn to “teach” the steps back to me and to family members for homework. Another added benefit to having students understand the purpose of therapy is that they will naturally become more motivated and engaged in the session. Explaining the purpose and helping them take more ownership of their goals improves intrinsic motivation.

I created a Teachers Pay Teachers activity to go with this idea. It includes worksheets for students to answer these questions as well asc “key” with verbal prompts for teaching the steps for the most commonly misarticulated sounds. You can find it here.

I also created a bundle that combines this activity with another one I created to help students associate their target sounds and learn the steps to correctly produce. You can find it here.

Enjoy!

I love reading books written for business and applying it to education and speech therapy. Check out the inspiration for this activity here: Drive by Daniel Pink

2 Questions for YOU and YOUR Students

The beginning of a school year is a great time to do some self-reflection and goal setting, for both students and teachers. This year, try a more creative approach to help them reflect and set goals for the year. Instead of the boring, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” or “What do you want to accomplish this year?” show your students this video and have them answer these 2 questions:

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

Daniel Pink’s book, Drive has been out for years, but I still get the best ideas from it and apply it to my work with children and education. I’ve been thinking a lot about executive functions lately and this video fits perfectly with the use of “self-talk”. Asking your students to think about their own life and encouraging them to ask themselves what they want to be remembered by will help motivate them throughout the year.

After they write their own sentence, help them create a visual art representation of it to feature their sentence and display it in the classroom. At the end of the week, have them reflect back on their week and answer the 2nd question. Have them write a few sentences and answer what went well and what they could have done differently. When I worked in a school, my teacher friend and I actually submitted a video with our sentence and our students’ sentences. Daniel Pink used a few of them in this video! See if you can spot me in it at 1:43  : )

What’s Your Sentence?: The Video from Daniel Pink on Vimeo

Here’s my sentence for this year:

“She helped teachers and students develop and discover a love for creativity and passion.”

What’s yours?

 

Discover more great ideas from Daniel Pink here: http://www.danpink.com/