Thursday, April 18, 2013

Four weird ways to motivate your clients when you have abso-flippin' nothin' left in your speech cabinets

The clinic I work at is moving this week and the movers came early and took my desk, table, chairs and most of my supplies.  So in honor of my lack of materials, I have another list:

Four weird ways to motivate your clients when you have abso-flippin' nothin' left in your speech cabinets
1.  Speech Picnic:  Spread a blanket on the floor.  This works really well to help define the empty room's space.  I actually had a snack that I'd picked up at the gas station to work on pragmatics and "picnic vocabulary"  I think it would have been fun to use paper plates and print out therapy targets and glue them onto the plates during the activity.  I didn't have glue or paper plates since they've all been moved but gas station snacks work nicely in an emergency.
2.  Visualization Exercises:  Today is April 18th-30 days AFTER the official start of Spring.  We had blizzard-like conditions for most of the day.  So while on our speech picnic, we practiced our visualization activities and pretended like it was a lake outside are window.  We talked about how we were going to go swimming and pretended to build a sandcastle.  We made sure to replenish our sunscreen so we didn't get burned.
3.  Go Water-skiing:  I think all of that extra floor sitting made me a little giddy.  I had one child who was having a hard time paying attention.  So we went water-skiing.  I was the boat, and she was the skier.  She had to follow me with her hands out like they were on the rope while we motored around the room.  Sometimes I would yell "crash" and she would have to fall over.  It ended up being a fun activity that helped her refocus on following my directions.
4.  Roll to your speech Targets:  Without tables or chairs, we ended up with ALOT of space.  So we could put speech sound cards on both sides and the client would roll (like a log) to one side to say a certain number of cards and then roll to the other side to say more cards.

What weird or creative ideas have you used to motivate your kids?

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