Hi SLP’s! It’s a new year and I’m more encouraged than ever at our growing community of SLP’s who want to help move our field to person-centered care. That means making therapy relevant, functional, and personal to the great variety of people we work with.

Because a picture is worth a thousand words: I am now on Instagram: @honeycombspeechtherapy.com   Follow Me!

I need YOUR help with a 4-week challenge so we can collect a bunch of FUNCTIONAL therapy ideas on Instagram. Here are the details:

Photo Credit: The Unlikely Homeschool. If your Speech Therapy Materials area looks like this, please consider person-centered care.

Have you noticed the trend in our field to use a generic workbook sheet as a primary therapy activity? Or maybe use a game closet as a primary source of therapy stimuli? The problem is, those activities are not evidence-based to make a real life difference in our patient’s everyday lives. It doesn’t matter if you improve with playing Sequence or Taboo, if you aren’t improving with organizing a grocery list or ordering a meal at a drive-through! Games and generic worksheets are often not the BEST choice for how we can spend our time, when we could choose a more efficient, real-life way to improve real-life skills.

Imagine you wanted to get better at making cakes. You wouldn’t want to spend all your practice time measuring ingredients and assume that would lead to a better finished product. No, you would want to actually practice making cakes! Maybe you would spend time practicing that one component of measuring the ingredients, but more often, you would actually want to practice the whole process to see if your new methods were helpful to the end goal.

In the same way, playing games or doing worksheets do not necessarily lead to an improvement of the end goal. The most efficient way to know if we are making improvements in someone’s everyday life is to actually practice that skill in context! We can use task-specific strategies, language aids, environment changes, or evidence-based frameworks to practice the ACTUAL TASKS that we hope to improve! If you need some ideas about how to use ACTUAL TASKS, please be sure to check out the Home Sweet Home Series and Back To Work Series for relevant topics!

Let’s give people LOTS of other ideas of valuable ways we can spend our speech therapy time with adults. This is the #TossTheWorkbooks and #CloseTheGameClosetSLP Challenge!

1. Snap a Picture of a FUNCTIONAL therapy activity you are working on! No generic worksheets or games allowed!

2. Sign into Instagram.

3. Share your photo and Tag me @honeycombspeechtherapy. Include #TossTheWorkbooks and #CloseTheGameClosetSLP!

I will be posting a few times a week for the next few weeks, but the BEST ideas are the ones we can come up with collectively! Follow @honeycombspeechtherapy to be inspired!