Oral Motor!

Earlier I did a post about my speech room. One of the photos in the post was of my oral motor kit. Since then, I have received a few emails regarding the kit and what I use. There has been a long standing debate on whether oral motor truly is beneficial or not. I personally think that it is. How can strengthening the oral muscles not be beneficial for students who have speech difficulties? The kit I have created is pretty basic. Being in the school system, I choose to do oral activities that are not invasive to the student.  Here is a photo of my oral motor basket:

1. The first thing in the basket is a box of grape flavored tongue depressors. I usually only use those when doing an oral motor exam during an evaluation. I also use them to apply the fluff....

2. Marshmallow Fluff! This has been my newest addition to the basket this year. I use the fluff to help the students locate the correct placement of their tongue for speech. For example, if we are working on the /l/ sound, I will put some fluff on the alveolar ridge. The kids also like when we make marshmallow mustaches and they get to lick them off. Great tongue exercises!! (Usually peanut butter is used for this activity. We are a nut-free school, so the fluff was my best back up!)

3. Cotton Balls. You may be thinking, cotton balls?? I use them for cotton ball races, of course! We have cotton ball races where the kids have to blow the cotton balls across the table and to a tape finish line. Sometimes we use straws to blow the cotton balls, too.

4. Bubbles! These are a favorite! I usually let my younger kids blow bubbles for about 5 mins. This is a great motivator for them and a great OM tool.

5. I also use an oral motor CD called, Speechercise that has a ton of exercises for the kids. They seem to prefer the cotton ball races and bubbles to the cd though :)

What do you use?

Got Fluff?

I have quite a few kids this year that are struggling with the L sound... especially getting their tongue to move up for production! I have heard about using peanut butter as a tactile stimulation technique, but since our school is "Nut Free" that idea went out the window! I was talking with a coworker and we decided Marshmallow Fluff would work just the same... boy did it!!

The kids had a great time with this. Now I get requests for "more marshmallows!" at every therapy session! To get my students to correctly produce the L sound, I took a tongue depressor and put some Fluff up behind their top teeth at their alveolar ridge. They were instructed to keep their mouth open and use their tongue to lick off the Fluff! The really fun part came next.... I gave them Marshmallow Mustaches they had to lick off! It was a great oral motor exercise! I would recommend this idea to anyone struggling with oral motor or sound production difficulties! Check out some pictures of us hard at work! :)

Marshmallow Mustaches!!

Using our tongue to get that mustache off!