Cooper is our star of the month.
Cooper is great kid. He’s the kind of kid who lights up the clinic with his personality and his inquisitive nature. When he comes to Kidmunicate for therapy, he makes his rounds and talks to everyone in the office. And he’s a great conversationalist too because he’s genuinely interested in learning more about the people he’s talking to. I guess he innately knows that people love to talk about themselves. Perhaps that’s why so many people love Cooper.
This was not always the case. Before Cooper started therapy, he was not much of a talker at all. If you ask his mom, she will tell you with a big smile that he did not talk much at all, now you cannot keep him quiet. We so are proud of the progress that Cooper has made and his continued efforts to hone his expressive language skills even more.
At Kidmunicate, we like to involve the children in relevant projects as part of therapy. This month we wanted to plan a Thanksgiving canned food drive to support the local food bank. We asked Cooper to help us to develop a plan and execute it.
During the canned food program development, we wanted to work on the following expressive language skills .
- Expanding the conversation
- Keeping the conversation relevant and on-point.
- Maintaining a smooth rhythm by slowing down speech rate.
- Articulating /th/ For example: THanksgiving.
- Language sequencing, putting things in the correct order.
- Recalling the steps.
- Empowerment
Step 1 – All kids who bring in a canned food item prior to Thanksgiving would be given a turkey to color in with Crayons®.
Step 2 – Once the turkey is colored in each kid would need to put his or her name on the back of the turkey.
Step 3 – Once the turkey has a name on it, the participant kids would hang the turkey on the wall.
Step 4 – The day before Thanksgiving, all of the colored turkeys would come down off the wall and be placed in a big bowl.
Step 5 – The winning turkey will be randomly selected from the bowl.
Step 6 – Kidmunicate awards a cool prize.
The Kidmunication Point
This Thanksgiving, we want to thank Cooper for all of his hard work over the years. That hard work is really paying off.
If you are extending therapy into the home or you are an SLP looking for a speech therapy idea for expressive language and sequencing this one worked well because it was engaging and relevant. Context and relevance are keys to success.
