As a private practice provider, I believe a huge part of my focus on functional skills is helping children use age-expected speech and langauge skills during conversation. For many of my patients, this means we work on them using correct grammar during conversation. To work on conversational grammar with Disney short videos I periodically pause …
Toca Kitchen Monsters is another FREE app from Toca Boca. It’s another fun way to address following directions during a naturalistic/play-based activity. In this game you pull the left side of the screen over to get various foods and the right side of the screen to find ways to prepare the foods. You can use …
I think this is my patients’ favorite game! Although many Toca Boca games are free, this one costs $3.99. I usually use it for social inferencing (identifying each pets’ feelings and the cause of those feelings), but I use it for irregular past-tense verbs, too. As we play the game I’ll ask the kids questions …
As an SLP who worked as a microbiology laboratory assistant in college I can’t help but feel annoyed when kids scrub their hands for less than a second! With all my preschool patients getting sick left-and-right lately I decided to try this Handwashing timer. Pros Cons I even added little timers to my cute handwashing …
This is honestly the tool I use most often. These cushions are like magic for children who have trouble sitting still like those who have ADHD or are just more active. Each cushion has 2 sides: on is bumpy and one is smooth. They usually come with a pump to inflate them and I like …
For a lot of kids who are learning to navigate our highly-social world, some of the most advanced skills are inferencing others’ wants, needs, thoughts, and relationships. When I worked in a clinic with lots of people around I had lots of opportunities to practice these skills while using the people around us as examples. …
“Tune In” time (instead of “time out”) is a part of the evidence-based discipline strategies from No-Drama Discipline by Dr. Daniel J. Siegel (professor of psychiatry) and Dr. Tina Payne Bryson (pediatric psychotherapist). I’ve combined this idea with the Zones of Regulation by giving my patients a place to calm down while sorting through their …
A few years ago I received a referral from a neurologist who had concerns about verbal memory. I did some research and found that, despite my lack of training in this area this is within an SLP’s scope of practice. I also found that there wasn’t a lot of evidence-based techniques for this area. The …
Disney shorts are the secret to my success with telehealth. When the word switched to online treatment due to the COVID-19 pandemic I started using these videos as an unstructured activity for grammar, pragmatic langauge, and narratives. Since then I’ve done lots of research about attention and brain waves during video calls and I find …
When I was in graduate school there was a lot of information about the difference between an “articulation disorder” and a “phonological disorder.” Then I started my internship and found that in order for an insurance company to pay for speech & langauge treatment the child needs a medical diagnosis and that these are found …
