The treatment approaches of speech therapy depend on what the client is working on. It is very often NOT sitting at a table and saying words after the therapist holds up a flash card. It is also not just playing a game (even if that’s what it looks like!). Don’t be fooled by our fun play-based, or strengths-based approaches, there is always a therapeutic plan being executed.
Here are a few types of therapy that you may see during in-home speech, language, feeding, pragmatics therapy sessions:
PLAY-BASED
This may include board games, toys, and/or pretend play with stuffed animals or dolls. Play-based therapy often encourages kids’ participation and engagement because it’s fun for them! When the kids are having fun, they will more likely have a lot to communicate about which are more opportunities for us to teach, model, shape speech and language targets, and ask or answer questions together. It is easy to increase repetitions of articulation drills between turns in a game, too, by asking the child to copy 10 words before you can spin the spinner, for example.
FLOORTIME
Dr. Stanley Greenspan created the Floortime Approach. A speech-langauge pathologist can be trained and certified in Floortime, an approach that focuses on the relationship between play partners. In speech therapy, Floortime values getting on the floor, or eye-to-eye, with a child and following their lead which creates communication opportunities. If a child is dysregulated or not engaged in play together, we would not expect them to communicate with us very much, so using a child’s interests can be the key to unlocking their communication.
FOOD EXPLORATION/PLAY
For our kids with rigid food preferences, playing with food can increase their tolerance and willingness to expose themselves to new foods in a low-pressure way. Exploring foods with all 5 of our senses and playing with food is often more successful in working towards actually tasting or eating foods, even it can take a while to get there. Think: having a cracker “walk” through a “forest” of vegetable “trees” to expose the child to smelling and touching cut, and therefore wet, peppers or carrots.
Of course, there are sessions when more structure is called for. Some older clients benefit from sitting at a table and drilling articulation materials with short breaks, as needed. When administering standardized assessments, probes can only be asked in a specific way or a certain number of times, so sessions when testing is being done may be less play-based, as well.
It can be fun to allow siblings or other family members join sessions. They can be another model along with the SLP while teaching the play partner about how the SLP may prompt the client to target their speech sounds or hold them accountable for using a word before they can take their turn. These strategies can be carried over when the SLP is not there and help generalize skills across contexts. This is a huge benefit of in-home speech therapy!
Hopefully, it was helpful to hear about how therapy can look different, yet still be productive towards goals. It really can be all fun and games with built-in speech therapy!
-Lauren-