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Allison Fors, Inc.

Speech Therapy Tools for SLPs and Educators

The 5 Best Speech Therapy Blog Posts of 2021

Happy New Year! 2021 was a one-of-a-kind year, with some both wonderful and challenging moments. Like many of you, I’m looking forward to 2022 and what it will bring.

The new year is a great time to look back. I’ve rounded up this past year’s most saved and read speech therapy blog posts here for you. 2021 brought much more cleft palate content with my cleft-affected daughter’s birth last year, which is reflected in what my readers found helpful – and what you might like, too. Happy reading!

TOP 5 SPEECH THERAPY POSTS

5. The Difference Between Social Skills and Pragmatics: You have no doubt heard and used the terms “social skills” and “pragmatics”, but what is the difference between the two? Most people use these terms interchangeably, but they don’t have the exact same definition! Pragmatics is one component of social communication skills, alongside social interaction, social cognition, and language processing.

4. Free Fall Speech Therapy Activities: Free fall and back to school speech therapy activities, reinforcers, and clipart! All to download and use now.

3. Common Cleft Palate Speech Compensatory Errors: Children with a cleft palate may learn to use abnormal speech sounds due to abnormal anatomical structures. These speech sounds are called compensatory errors and oftentimes persist after surgery due to learned behavior and require speech therapy to remediate. As SLPs and SLPAs, it is important to recognize and identify specific compensatory errors when working with this population. Approximately 25% of children with cleft palates use compensatory articulation errors and glottal stops are the predominant error!

2. Treating Cleft Palate in Speech Therapy: A fantastic overview of cleft palate speech therapy with guest blogger, Meg Lico, a craniofacial SLP in New York. She discusses what her typical day looks like, the typical speech characteristics of those with cleft palate, compensatory errors, nasal air emission, and more!

1. 7 Sensory Play Activity Ideas:

Sensory play is a fantastic and underutilized tool to use in speech therapy. Use these ideas to stimulate language, social skills, and motor skills! The more senses we can incorporate, the better children are able to learn and the more they are able to retain. Not only does sensory play help to stimulate the senses, but it also engages the child to build a wide range of skills, including speech and language.

It’s also a lot of fun, with endless possibilities! I share lots of sensory play activity ideas on my Instagram page, so I’ve rounded up a few of my favorites to get you started.

Is there a topic you’d like to see in one of my 2022 speech therapy blog posts? Let me know in the comments!

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The 5 Best Speech Therapy Blog Posts of 2021

January 1, 2022 allisonfors Leave a Comment Filed Under: Speech Therapy Education, Therapy Ideas

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Hi, I'm Allison! A speech & language resource author who loves the creative process of making therapy materials and clipart, as well as connecting with educators world wide. Learn more about me here! Read More…

Effective communication comes in all shapes and si Effective communication comes in all shapes and sizes! Verbal, written, gestures, sign language, an AAC device...

As educators we understand this but it’s also our responsibly to relay and explain this to caregivers!
“Children gesture before they begin to speak and “Children gesture before they begin to speak and continue gesturing throughout the language learning process...children’s early gestures not only precede, but also predict, the onset of a number of linguistic milestones–nouns, nominal constituents, simple and complex sentences. Gesturing may thus play a causal role in language learning, and could do so in two ways: (1) Gesturing gives children the opportunity to practice expressing ideas in a preverbal form. (2) A child’s gestures offer parents and other communication partners insight into the child’s linguistic level, thus giving the partners the opportunity to provide input tailored to that level.”

Goldin-Meadow, S. How gesture helps children learn language. (2014)

Some caregivers worry that we are giving up on verbal language when we begin using gestures or other non-verbal forms of communication.But gestures can be an amazing stepping stone to words. They seem to help the concept of communication click for a child...If I do this, then I get what I want/need! Have you found this to be the true?
SPEECH INTELLIGIBILITY • I updated this graphic SPEECH INTELLIGIBILITY • I updated this graphic with the newest research!

Note: These numbers are based on unfamiliar listeners in an unknown context. You will notice the dark blue is the milestone (when 95% of children at this intelligible) and the light blue is the average (when 50% of children are this intelligible.)

The snapshot on the left is a summary given by the researchers (Hustad, et al.) as a quick way to remember and recite this new information.

Find these updated intelligibility levels in the Free SLP Handouts!

The paid handouts were updated a while back with this new information and have a more detailed summary, including word-level intelligibility. If you own them, be sure to redownload!

Free Speech Therapy Handouts: bit.ly/FreeSLPHandouts
Speech-Language Development Handouts: bit.ly/SLPHandouts
Save this post! 📚 Some favorite books for soc Save this post! 📚 

Some favorite books for social emotional learning >> inferencing >> verbs >> negation

You can find more book round-ups by categories at: allisonfors.com/?=books
📣📣📣 Phoneme awareness is the ability to b 📣📣📣 Phoneme awareness is the ability to break down a word into the smallest unit or sound. This includes phoneme isolation, blending, segmenting, addition, deletion, and substitution.

It’s ESSENTIAL to work on these skills starting in Preschool and continuing to focus on them in Kindergarten and First Grade!

The Speech-Language Development Handouts break down what to target at each grade level + the phonological awareness steps with definitions and examples!

bit.ly/SLPHandouts
What can we expect from toddler attention span? ⏰ It’s easy to over-expect the amount of time a child can sit and attend to a structured activity. Do these numbers surprise you or are they what you’d expect?

Memory trick 💡 You can remember the number of minutes a child can attend is approximately twice the child’s age.

Note: Don’t forget to use developmental age.

Save this post + tag an educator or parent!

Gaertner et al. (2008) Focused Attention in Toddlers

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