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!