As much as we value being in children’s natural environments by seeing them at their house, our time together is still only a tiny amount- one hour out of 168 hours of a week! It is important for us as therapists to make sure we provide home-programming that families feel like they can easily build into their daily routines. One strategy to target articulation and/or expressive communication is picking some ‘Words of the Week’. We can do this by picking a set of words to heavily target in order to give more opportunities for using them while feeling both functional and realistic.
The primary purpose of selecting a set of words to target over a week are to give additional opportunities to practice using them. It can be helpful to pick words to use during a specific time of day or an activity. For example, if the child is practicing the S sound, target words for a game could be: spin, slide, next, oops, first, last, dice, six.
Try practicing the Words of the Week as often as you can to promote the most progress. You could put the words on a piece of paper and leave it on your fridge or play area for reminders, too. Happy practicing!
-Lauren