Articulation & Phonology in Scribblenauts Land

This isn't an app review, but more of an Aha! moment....

I am a huge fan of Scribblenauts. I am absolutely fascinated by the fact that you can type in pretty much anything and they create it instantly and can spend way too much time playing it at home in therapy with my clients. I love the fact that it works on so many language goals, critical thinking and problem solving skills, making inferences, and everything else you want it to do. When I saw a level show up as an "adjective level" I was over the moon.

#win

My dilemma came when a little one showed up on Monday demanding Scribblenauts for his artic therapy. Seriously they always want me to be creative on the spot! Anyway I thought for a bit and came up with the photos below to work on his "sh" sound.

Honestly I had to thank him for this one, because we have never had so much fun in Artic Therapy. We had great sentence level productions with the "chef on the ship", the "shell that fell on the shark," the "angry shark that attacked the chef" (and killed him.....sorry it got a little violent).  He was able to think of his own "sh" words and silly scenarios and we really targeted those sounds. 

After this session I was so excited to use it all through the week, both in artic therapy and in cycles at single word level. We made pictures for multisyllabic words, velars, clusters, everything. Now I'm hooked.  Another fave was my "farm in the forest." The frog in the picture was actually a farmer who got attacked by the evil fairy and got turned into this with the magic wand (not my fault). 

So I'm loving it. Check it out and use it for articulation & Phono therapy in the free play level. Let me know how it goes! 

Sort this Out Pack - Review with Giveaway

It has been a while since I've done an app review, so when my friends over at Therapy Box  asked me to review one of their apps for Speech Therapy I just couldn't say no. It's a perfect app for us speechies as we head into a few months of summer fun, since I personally love summer time to really focus on categorization skills. These are some of the targeted language skills that are great for my summer groups.

Sort This Out Pack is an app which is designed to help work on children's categorization skills. Apps for categories are always a handy addition to any therapist's toolbox, since not only do they work on categorization skills, they also expand receptive and expressive vocabulary.  This colorful, and interactive app has a train theme (Who doesn't love trains?) where the train pulls into various stations; the beach, city, zoo, and theme park (The zoo animals are the cutest)

After a truck unloads the cargo boxes at each station, the train enters for collection, and the goal is to sort the items into two categories, which make up the carriages on the train. What I really like about this app is that you can customize your categories in the "Settings" panel, and chose what comes at each station. The set categories are ocean, weather, fruit, vegetables, animals, transport, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, tools, shapes, drinks, sports, body parts, plants, toys, cleaning, music, school, house, insects. Plus you have the option of adding your own categories using your personal photos. There is also a button to record your own voice to label each photo.

Another useful feature that can be customized when interacting with this app is the type of prompts provided. You can turn on auditory or written cues to add support where necessary.

I've been playing so far in "errorless" mode, where if you drop an item into the wrong carriage it will bounce back to the bottom of the screen to let you know that it doesn't belong there. However, there is also the option to turn this off, and then a blue symbol will appear to show which ones do not belong in that category.

At the end when all the items are in their correct categories, players are treated to a fireworks display and a "well done" from the conductor as the train moves off to the next station.

There is also a "results" page, which allows you to email results from each station for your personal records.

I've really been enjoying using this app so far, and it has been well received by the little ones in my practice. They love filling up the train, and I've also transferred it to my Thomas train set activity which allows us to sort items around the clinic.

As a therapist what I would suggest to the developers is the ability to add more categories. This way, as children master this level there is the opportunity to have 3 or 4 categories at one station, to make it more challenging.

If you think that this app sounds like it's for you, you can pick it up here on the iTunes store.

Our lovely friends at Therapy Box were kind enough to provide a copy for me to give away.  You can enter below with Rafflecopter. The winner will be announced next Tuesday!

*UPDATE* We have a winner!! Congrats to Kathleen for winning a copy of Sort This Out Pack App. I hope you enjoy using it in therapy!

Functional? Reflections of a Therapist

For these moments when my mind rambles into a Facebook post, and I think to myself...."Hey that's a blog post right there...." 

Quick(ish) post between office work tonight, as I reflect on my day, and some of the 'awesomeness' that was created today in therapy (like some good old chocolate chip cookies....but I digress...). Today made me think about how many accommodations we as therapists make for our clients within the clinic setting. We try to present 'real life' scenarios that in reality are so far from real life....since sometimes without even realizing it we anticipate the difficulties a client may have, and make certain accommodations, provide the supports to suit. It's only when we place them in real world, true functional situations, that we realize how tough it really is in the world. I see this particularly with my patients with aphasia. Today for example we worked on a goal of calling places to find out certain types of info (mainly as it relates to numbers, since this is a goal). We practiced in a 'role play' first then made the calls, and it was only then that I realized how much I was, slowing down, and emphasizing the target information that she needed to find out. I also was more aware of how quickly people in customer service speak, and rattle off numbers (Not even mentioning factors like background noise etc.). Anyway Kudos to the persons at the companies I called today! They didn't have a clue that this was a therapy exercise, nor that the person not the other line had suffered a stroke, but still remained patient, slowed when they realized they weren't being understood, and made sure they clarified all the relevant information.  #foodforthought

The Aphasia Group

Today, I had the pleasure of hosting my first Aphasia group, with two young ladies who had suffered from strokes within the past few months. They both have moderate aphasia, with only mild comprehension deficits, nonfluent speech, difficulty with confrontation naming, and significant word finding difficulties.

This was the first time they had ever met, and you could tell they were both quite nervous. However, as we were doing the icebreaker activity, when one started to talk, the other suddenly exclaimed "She talks like me!!!" and they both burst into giggles. That was all the icebreaker they needed. They had a lovely session, where they encouraged each other, helped cue each other (I was like who's the therapist here now?), gave high fives, and even ganged up on me. It was so good to have that support of someone who was experiencing the same difficulties, who could be patient while waiting for them to get out the right words, because they knew the frustration of knowing what to say, but just not being able to get those words out. Hearing things like "It's ok I have that problem too," "Come on, you can do it," "Don't give up," made me so proud of these two. We were able to do so much more than in an individual session, for example individual therapy sessions are usually based on answering questions, and today I was able to tap into difficulties/strengths in asking questions. By the end of the session they had created a new friendship, made me take their photo together, and exchanged whatsapp information to maintain contact. It was such a blessing to be able to not only help them regain their language skills, but also to provide for them the support of another person who truly understands what they are going through. I'd recommend for any therapist to host an aphasia group and see the impact it has on your clients, and also on you as a professional, and a person.

Session Format:

1. Icebreaker- Participants were required to take turns asking each other and asking questions about themselves. Questions chosen ranged from "what is your name?" to "Do you have a boyfriend?". (They chose the questions not me).

2. How do I feel when….? (Talking about the impact of their stroke, how it has affected their lives)

3. Guessing game- Used functional pictures from the LARK  and played a game where one had to use the strategies they have been learning in therapy to describe a picture of an object (e.g. what does it look like, what is it used for etc.), and the other person guess what it was.

4. Feedback on session

Quickly Blogs and runs away

Haven't been here in forever. However a post I made on fb today gave me the idea to do quick posts of things I'm doing or seeing in therapy. Will try that. I'm on instagram as well these days showing off my speechie life as @speechreka. There are also some fashion, photography and posts of my general day in there (Hey I am a real person), so you can weed through those. Here's my speech musing today:

I had long convo with an SLP in the USA who called me to get some therapy ideas for her little ones. When chatting with her it made me think about the artic/phono targets that many of us choose for our little ones, particularly those with motor planning difficulties or low tone. When moving up to 2 syllable words many of the popular workbooks give an interesting list of words such as cowboy, pizza etc. which need wider phonemic repertoire and greater motor sequencing ability to produce. I prefer to start with nice reduplicated bilabials (which also have good functional relevance language wise) like bye bye, mummy, bubble, boo-boo, puppy, baby, and include happy, apple, open. I find littles with Down Syndrome find it more challenging to produce multisyllabic words, and expand their utterances in general. These words come in quite handy for this and can be used to build a range of semantic functions (bye-bye baby). What say you speechies?

Once upon a time

I love working on narrative and looking at narrative development in children. It's something that I find many speech therapists tend to shy away from, but it is such a valuable tool. I had a lecturer and clinical supervisor who was very passionate about narrative and story grammar markers and all the fun stuff that goes along with it, and I ended up doing my Masters thesis on how 5 year old children tell stories. Here I looked at how children used a wordless picture book (One Frog too Many) to retell a story.
Through my thesis work and my clinical practice I have seen how informative narrative assessment can be, to critically evaluate a child's vocabulary knowledge, ability to relate events that happened and sequence events in logical order, use of appropriate syntax, ability to give clear descriptions, use of connectors, use of inferences and prediction, use of connecting words, referencing using pronouns, auditory memory, and so much more. It is fascinating to see how children of the same age can vary from giving very basic picture descriptions to producing true narratives filled with expanded details and  direct speech.

When I did my thesis I based much of my analysis on a narrative assessment which was a favorite in the University clinic by Black Sheep Press. This assessment called Peter and the Cat Narrative Assessment, is a norm referenced test which, after supported analysis gives an excellent descriptive profile for key language areas in narrative development. It also allows for planning goals for intervention in therapy.  It's a very interesting story, with beautiful illustrations about a boy who tries to rescue a cat from a tree and ends up being stuck in the tree, needing rescue himself. This allows for all the story grammar markers to be used: Setting, initiating event, response, plan, resolution, coda and gives you examples and guidance on how to transcribe and score them appropriately. It also looks at features such as story content and structure, vocabulary, connectors, adverbials, referencing and story register in the analysis. Couldn't get any better right?

Well it has!  I found out a few weeks ago that they made this amazing assessment into an iPad app (*fistpump*) ! It has the same cool features, great graphics and it's a very handy portable assessment tool for therapists. Guess what I downloaded quickly and have been using all week with my little ones! You can choose between male or female narrators with different accents, and it allows you to store each client individually, with their own recorded story and report. It also has password protection to ensure patient confidentiality of files. The pages turn like a real book, and I found the children were more engaged and focused during the assessment for both listening to the narrator and the retell.

Another good thing is that you can choose to exit the program and come back later to transcribe (who has time to transcribe the same time) and complete the analysis. Each page gives you the same descriptive profiles as the hard copy of the assessment and provides guidelines for analysis, then it compiles it all into a report for you to email and print for your records. How neat is that! The price of $49.99 I find is pretty reasonable for an established assessment, especially for the type of analysis it provides.

So if you're looking to venture into the wonderful world of narrative assessment and intervention give it a try!

Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Bubbles!!

Far far away on a small island in the Caribbean sea, it wasn't business as usual for one of the schools, as a crazy (by general consensus) Speech Therapist marched up and down shouting strange things like "Arrrrgh" and "Ahoy Mateys" and singing "Yo ho ho and a bottle of whatever came to her mind!" Just as they were deciding to make that call to finally give her the help she needed..... they learnt that it was Talk Like a Pirate Day!!!!

Shiver me timbers! First off I must say that I wasn't planning to talk like a pirate today, nor did I even plan to observe the day's existence. However the constant pirate tweets by @lessonpix and the @speechdudes, as well as an excellent blog post  from lesson pix with great tips for the day, got me hooked (giggle).

I headed for my toy cupboard and collected all the treasures I could find. Unfortunately I didn't have any pirate garb lying around, so this was what I came up with in the end.

And off I went to school, where I worked with children aged 14 months to 10 years. The highlight of the day of course was pop up pirate, which I used to target a range of skills, for individuals and groups. It went surprisingly well with my 4-6 yo group who are working on awareness of others, attention and listening, and turn taking and we had lots of fun. 

I had another group of little boys between 3-5 who are known to be runners and roamers, and our main focus is engagement, maintaining joint attention, imitation skills etc.  That group marched around the room with me shouting "Arrrgh" and "Yo ho ho. (and a bottle of bubbles)" They also enjoyed group favorite no. 2: putting the pirates on the pirate ship and sailing it across to each other :) 

I wondered to myself how I would adapt my theme for my baby group. We ended up doing lots of mirror play saying 'arrrrgh' and making fun sounds, and played the Pierre the parrot app on the iPad, which is always all round fun. 

However some little ones didn't quite like my "arrrgh" so we had to rock and go "shhhhhh" instead. 

My highlight of the day was showing a teacher how she could use AAC in her classroom for the children to play an interactive game together. I found a great board from Boardmakershare, which really worked well for requesting and building vocab and the children loved it! What I loved is that this board didn't only have vocab for the game, it also had visuals for 'my turn', 'your turn,' 'high five'  etc. which made the interaction even richer :)  

                                            He especially loved my 'Arrrrgghhhhhh!'

So I had a fun "Talk Like a Pirate Day' and, despite the strange looks from some teachers, I think the children had a blast! 

Did you do anything fun today??