Speech Therapy For a Big Kid... Part II

Thursday, February 16, 2012
A few weeks ago I reached out to all of you regarding a new private client I was going to start working with. I wanted to give you all an update on how that was going and some things that have worked with him so far. Starting speech therapy with a 20 year old took me way out of my comfort zone! I have not worked with adult clients since graduate school. My usual day consists with 3-8 year olds! So you can imagine the hard time I was having keeping Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, and SpongeBob activities out of my head!

During our first session, I completed an evaluation on him to see what sounds we needed to work on during therapy. From our telephone conversations, I knew R was going to be a target. So I also brought along my Entire World of R screener to really get a good idea on what specific R sounds we needed to work on. From there, I did some stimulation activities to see how severe/ mild each target sound was. I also had a conversation with him about what his goals were for therapy. Being 20 years old, he can steer the ship as far as what to work on in therapy. I gave him a homework assignment to ask friends and family members to tell him what words they had a hard time understanding him say and make a list. Practicing words relevant to his life will be much more beneficial than just drilling random R words.

For our second session, I did some auditory discrimination tasks with him. This will help him train his ear to start listening for his own errors. My video recorder on my iPad has been my best friend for these therapy sessions. After we drill words or senences, I record him and let him watch himself back to self assess. This has been very helpful, although I think he is harder on himself than I am on him!

My next idea is to find an app that records your voice and puts it into text. Then he can record himself and see how well the computer understands his speech. Thank you to everyone that gave some input as far as therapy recommendations! Have a wonderful day!

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