What if…speech and language therapy went BEYOND “Webber” cards…

Alright, now you may have figured out by now that I’m REALLY excited about this project of mine. As I’ve said before, each day I seem to have a new ah-ha moment. This next one I think is by far my most favorite!

For those of you who are SLPs and SLPAs (Speech-Language Pathologists and Assistants) – particularly those working in schools - when I say “Webber”, you know exactly what I am talking about. Recognize these guys?

Webber Cards

WA01_03

WFC02B

For those of you who are not in the profession, these are products from a very well-known company that really has a monopoly on therapy materials in the areas of speech and language. There are a few other companies out there, yes, but this one is the Big Kahuna. Traditional therapy often involves two main components: the stimulus and the activity. The stimulus are these types of cards or pages from a workbook with lists of sentences, questions, or short stories. The activity is often some kind of a board game, craft, puzzle, or small group activity. I often find that therapists are really very good at changing up the activity but because these stimulus items are expensive and our schools are not financially prepared to refresh the materials library more than once every 15-20 years or so, the kids who spend several years in speech therapy get to know these pictures, stories, questions, and answers REAL QUICK!

Don’t get me wrong, I looooove these fabulous materials as much as the next therapist and this isn’t an attack on this company in particular. I am using these as an example. It seems that ALL therapy materials use these generic, clip-art style images, rudimentary sketches, or photographs of “real life” people and objects. Yes, they are VERY useful! They are cute, high quality, and take a LOT of work off my plate as far as finding stimulus items that target my students’ very specific goals. If there is a goal for it, there is a deck, a workbook, or a board game to address it. But how many of you have found that your students have memorized the Short Stories for Auditory Memory deck and are answering questions before you even finish asking them? We have a BIG job making sure the stimuli are used long enough to teach the skill while not being used so long that the student has learned the answers rather than learning the skills to be able to answer regardless of what the question is.

So back to my big Ah-ha…let’s see if I can organize it in the way it came into my brain…

How could I use Lewis Carroll’s works IN therapy?

There’s a LOT in there! Poetry, descriptions, inferences, multiple meanings, opposites, settings, conflicts…wow… a LOT!

Man…it would be REALLY refreshing to talk about this stuff instead of those boring cards!

But I don’t want to only expand my students’ vocabulary in relation to these stories…what else could I use?

Other stories! The library…HELLO!!! Endless resource for children’s literature! What else…

Art! I wonder if there are little box sets of cards with actual famous works of art on them! [google…google…google…] There are!!!

Art cards

51NL26IgpuL

And not just paintings…what about sculpture?

And photography?

And Poetry!

Poetry

41E6T89HM2L

And Music! … Song lyrics!...Album art!

51fHyQWeQ-L

Music

51A6TTrpcmL

And Architecture!

And Dance!

Dance

51oqoCk9KKL

…What if instead of talking about buying a “pickle for a nickel” we talked about a stanza from a page in Where the Sidewalk Ends?

…What if instead of describing an apple with the Expanding Expression Tool (EET), we describe a pictures of the Sydney Opera House?

It’s not that there’s no purpose at all to work at the more basic levels. It’s more that I feel I now have somewhere to go after we’ve already done all that. I feel like our kids are exposed to the same themes over and over again in class, in their tv shows, in therapy…this month is about bugs! Next month is about community helpers! Last month we did “On the Farm”! Those are all GREAT things to learn about but what if speech therapy gave them an opportunity to reach beyond the common and work with topics that are less familiar. I am willing to bet if I show a group of students a picture of the Taj Mahal and we use the EET to describe everything we can about it (while learning new vocabulary so that they CAN describe it), they’d go back to class with a better ability to describe the butterfly they are talking about in class.

Why can’t speech therapy be an avenue to bring ART back into the schools?

My objective in therapy is to improve speaking and listening. The topics I use to teach how to do those skills better do NOT have to be exactly the same as the topics you are teaching in class. They can be – they often are – but they don’t have to be. I can teach a student to produce an /st/ blend with this:

just as easily as I can with this:

What if the topics we use were so engaging that the need for an additional activity wasn’t even necessary a lot of the time? Or what if the activity was related? We do play-doh while we discuss sculptures and we do yoga while we talk about dance?

THIS is what I’m talking about when I say this project …something that started as an idea for the theme of my classroom décor…has got me thinking sideways about what I do. When I worked in a small private practice clinic, I have to say, the therapy there was a lot more creative because we had nice big rooms with 50 minutes 1:1 with each child doing play-based therapy on the floor because the clients we treated were either very young or very delayed and their natural approach to learning at that stage was through play. Once I transitioned into the schools, therapy looked a lot more like this:

Again, this style of therapy is very purposeful. I’m not knockin’ it! I’m just asking where can I go from here?

What if it looked a little more like THIS???

Alternative Therapy Settings?

alice-in-wonderland-party-1a

49f49293de7b692597ffa042933ac011

…except on a smaller scale and instead of place settings we had books or whiteboard style place mats or…maybe there would be place settings sometimes! Culinary arts! We could describe an interesting food! I could go on and on…

I am SO thankful to have a fresh new perspective on therapy and I am excited to reinvigorate my approach to treatment. I hope those of you in the field feel inspired to turn your practice on its head and think outside the fun deck too.

Footnote: I know there are SLPs and SLPAs out there who have come to this conclusion long before I had. I know there are HIGHLY creative and resourceful clinicians out there reading this right now thinking “Duh Mary, where have you been? I do this all the time!” If that’s you, my message is this: YAY!!! I’m SO happy that you have come to this on your own. BUT it doesn’t come that easily for everyone. Some people need a push from another in the field, need a spark of inspiration from an experience, or need to hit rock bottom in terms of motivation and drive in their careers before beginning to think outside the pre-packaged therapy materials box. So if you’re already here, good! I’m glad! Now go find a newbie or an oldbie or anyone else who hasn’t gotten to this ah-ha yet and share your gift. It IS a gift. Don’t waste energy scoffing at those who have been relying heavily on prepared materials. This lit a fire under me. Go ignite someone whose fire is out.