Review of Smart Kids board games by Helen

I do a lot of work with junior age children (age 7-11 for anyone not in the UK) with comprehension and expressive language problems. It’s always a challenge to find materials at the right level and targeting the right skills. I find that the way things look at this age is really important – the kids I work with need a lot of visual support, but they don’t want things to look babyish. They respond so much better to colour pictures (as most children of all ages do, I find) and if photos look too old-fashioned they notice more at this age, and aren’t as interested. Get the activity and materials right and the child is much more engaged and hence learns more.

One of my favourite places to buy from for this age group is SmartKids. (The US branch is here).  They make lots of great resources, but today I’m going to focus on their board game sets, as they’re such great value for money – £19.99 for a set of 6 or 7. They do lots of sets, but the best ones for speech and language therapy are the questioning set and the speaking and listening set. Today I’m going to talk about the speaking and listening set.

This has 6 boards, 3 of which I use quite frequently. One works on describing skills. Each player has a card with around 50 numbered words to describe. They are split into categories – things, actions, feelings, people… Whichever number you land on, you look up that item and describe it for the other players to guess. The child does need to be able to read as there are no pictures, but aside from that it’s a great description game. The feelings are noticeably more difficult to describe, but I usually give them a lot more help with these.

The first choice game was a hit with a 10 year old girl I worked with yesterday. Here each square names a category and you have to say your favourite thing in that category and why ( eg favourite animal or favourite lunch). It’s great for starting to work on giving opinions and realising that everyone likes different things and thinks different things and that’s ok. It also has a nice feature in that some of the squares are labelled Listening Test. If you land on one of these, you have to remember what the person next to you said, which means that if you’re playing with a group, they can’t switch off when it’s not their turn!

There is also a good one for responding to questions. Each square has a picture of an object and there is also a spinner. When you land on a square, you spin the spinner and answer the question it lands on – where would you find it? Why would you use it? How would you use it? Or when would you use it? The part the kids tend to find most tricky is answering the right question. Those question words can be really tricky, and I find this game useful for teasing out the differences between why and how, and between when and where.

As well as these 3, you also get 3 more games, focusing on mime, making up characters, and telling a story, but I haven’t used those very often, so I won’t comment on them here, except to say the pictures are quite cartoony and the one time I did use the story one, we found it really hard to make a cohesive story rather than one that just goes “and then…. And then….”. That may just be that I haven’t used it enough and the child had difficulty with story- telling however.

Anyway, £19.99 for 6 good quality board games is pretty good value in my book, even if you only use 3 or 4 of them regularly.  You can buy these from Smart Kids UK or the US branch.

I have not been asked to write this review – I’m just sharing something that I find useful.

What other resources do you use with this age group?

 

But they can’t do it ……. by Elizabeth

Something that has come up a few times this week with the parents and teaching assistants I have spoken to revolves around what children can and can’t do.  For example I was talking about the concepts of hard versus soft and the TA said he couldn’t do it. So the first question I ask is “what did you ask the child to do and what pictures/items where you using?” In my head, I’m thinking through the process, the question asked and the child’s response and trying to find where the break down is.  Just because the response was incorrect, doesn’t always mean the child didn’t understand. It could have been a word finding error, or a speech error or maybe they weren’t listening!!

So I thought I would pick an example and work through how to teach it.  I’m going to use colour, as this is tricky.  However the principles apply to any concepts.

Firstly pick basic colours to start with. Most young children don’t know burgundy and aqua! Start with red, blue, green, yellow and maybe orange and pink!

Step 1
Teaching colours has an extra step compared to other concepts. With colour I always start with the question of “find me one the same”. So you need a number of objects in the colours you want to work on.  It’s also best to start with 2 or 3 colours at first and then slowly add more in. The big tubs of wooden bricks work well as you get lots of each colour and they are normally good primary colours.  Spread out lots of bricks, pick one up and ask the child to find you one the same.  You can say the colour as well, but don’t expect the child to use it correctly yet. You can then sort the bricks into colour piles.  You can do this with other things as well, but it might become confusing to the child. If you have a range of cars say in differ colours, it might be odd to ask for one the same when the two blue cars look completely different!  To keep it simple you could use coloured circles for example, so they are all the same except the colour.

Step 2
“Find me the ……. one”. So the next step is reliant on the child understanding the colour names and being able to find the appropriate one.  You could use the bricks again, or coloured shapes, and ask the child to find a specific colour. Now if this is too hard, try holding up 2 or 3 items and asking for a specific colour. By reducing the options you are making it easier. When the child can do this confidently, move onto the last step.

Step 3
“What colour is this?” The final step needs the child to not only understand the idea of colour, but to make a judgement on the colour and then name it correctly.  Again you can use your bricks or shapes and ask them to say what colour the item is. As an extension of this, you can let the child play teacher and ask you to find a certain colour. Every now and then get it wrong and hold up a different colour and see if they comment that you got it wrong (most children will immediately point out that you are wrong as its funny!!).

You can then start generalising this skill on to other items or start working on different colours.  You can also start work on remembering colours outside of the here and now.  For example working on questions like “what colour is our table” when not looking at it – this needs an understanding of colour and the ability to remember and visualise items as well.

Some children will progress through the steps very quickly, others will take longer.  This is ok as all children progress differently. However if you find the child is really stuck it is worth going back a step and making sure they can complete it.  If the child is stuck at the first step, it may be worth writing down the errors they make to see if they are consistently making errors, say with blue and green as this may indicate a perceptual problem with the colours like colour blindness, or it may just mean they aren’t quite ready to work on colour yet.

App giveaway results

Just a note to say that the app winners are:-

Toca Store – Amy

Toca House – Candace, Shelby and Janet.

Congratulations all 4 of you – check your emails!  Thanks for participating all who did.  Hopefully we’ll be able to do more giveaways in the future!

Helen and Elizabeth

Free App Giveaway! by Helen and Elizabeth

Yes, we have free apps to give away this week! Rather excitingly, Helen saw that Toca Boca were asking for bloggers to review their apps and were also giving free copies for a giveaway. Helen and I each received one free app for writing the blog and a further 4 to giveaway. We have been given Toca house and Toca store. This developer has many apps, normally priced at £1.99, such as Toca robot lab, Toca kitchen, Toca Tea party. Some for 2-6 year olds and some for 3-7 year olds. These apps are not designed for speech therapists but can be a great addition to your therapy kit!

Toca House
In Toca house, there are a number of characters in different rooms of a house and you have to help them with different chores. There are 19 different types of task, presented in different ways. For example mowing the lawn, washing dishes or hanging up the washing. This is an engaging app, with bright colours and friendly characters. It is easy to use and has enough variation to keep children interested. There are also many opportunities for language development:-

 

- Vocabulary; encouraging your child to name the items of clothes going in the washing machine or being hung on the washing line – and their colours. You can also name the different rooms. In the kitchen you can name the food.
- Concept development; lots of good repetition on dirty vs. clean, wet vs. dry, up vs. down
- Colour matching/ sorting; you have to match the post to the correct character which is done by colour. You could also encourage your child to name the colours as well
- Opinion; whilst putting the food away in the kitchen, you can discuss if you like a certain food or not.
- Turn taking – my go then your go!
- The individual mini games don’t take very long and could be used as a motivator for any speech or language work you are doing

Toca Store
The Toca Store app is a pretend shop on the iPad. What child doesn’t love playing shops?! You start by looking through a catalogue and choosing 5 items to stock in your shop. Then ask a customer to come and buy an item. It’s a 2 -way game – the shopkeeper picks a price and the customer has to pay, then put the item in their bag. There are loads of opportunities for language work with this app. Here are a few ideas:-

- Work on auditory memory by asking for up to 5 items and seeing if the child can remember them.
- Categorisation – ask the child to stock food, or toys etc. See if they can think of more items to fit that group which aren’t in the catalogue.
- Basic number – you can price items up to 6 coins and then count in the right number.
- Work on the social skills involved in buying things in a shop – students can role play what the shopkeeper and customer should say.

Thanks to the generous people at Toca Boca, we have one Toca Store app and 3 Toca House apps to giveaway!! Put a comment underneath with a link to your website or your email address to enter – we’ll pick 4 winners next Sunday, 12.05.2013.

If you don’t want to put your email address in the comment, just put a comment and email us with a way to contact you on speechbloguk@gmail.com. Good luck!

What is speech and language therapy? by Helen

I initially came across the idea of speech and language therapy as a career through my university careers office as I was coming to the end of my degree in English.  It wasn’t a profession I knew much about, and, as I read, I became more and more excited about the idea of it, as it combined my two main interests  so perfectly – language and working with children.  I went to see a couple of speech and language therapists at work, and as far as I was concerned my future career path was set – this was exactly what I wanted to do.  (The only problem was that I now realised that I had done the wrong degree and needed to go back to uni!).

When you become immersed in what you do day to day, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that to many people, discovering the existence of speech and language therapy can be as much of a revelation as it was to me back then.  And even those who do know often have little idea what sorts of things speech and language therapists can help with.  When I tell people that I’m a speech and language therapist, people often assume that I do elocution, or they think of The Kings Speech!

The quickest answer to who we work with is anyone with a difficulty with communication or swallowing.  Wait a minute… Swallowing?  What does that have to do with speech?!  We’ll come back to that in a minute!

Speech and language therapists (SLTs in the UK or SLPs in many other countries) work with people of all ages.  The majority of therapists will specialise with one particular age range – either children or adults, and they may specialise further within that.  Some therapists work with people of all ages throughout their career.

Speech and language therapists work in a variety of settings; hospital words, outpatients, community clinics, nurseries, schools, care homes, people’s own homes, prisons, all sorts of places!  And as for the difficulties we work with, here are a few.  There are so many that I am bound to miss some out

• Children who are slow to start talking
• People (especially children) with unclear speech
• Children born with cleft palates
• People who have had a stroke which has affected communication or swallowing skills
• People with degenerative conditions such as multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease
• People who have suffered from traumatic brain injury
• People who stammer

People of all ages with

• Learning difficulties
• Autistic Spectrum Disorders
• Hearing impairments
• Difficulty understanding what is said to them
• Difficulty putting sentences together
• Word finding difficulties
• Physical disabilities
• Feeding and swallowing difficulties
• Social skills difficulties ( for example, difficutlty with eye contact, facial expansions and understanding social situations)
• Difficulty with attention and listening
• Voice problems

Why swallowing?  Well,  since speech and eating and drinking involve many of the same muscles, speech and language therapists often have a lot of knowledge in this area, and have become a vital part of the team involved in dealing with feeding difficulties in both adults and children. Sometimes, speech and feeding difficulties occur in the same people, as the same muscles are involved.  In the UK at least, dysphagia (swallowing work) requires a separate postgraduate qualification, so it’s something not all therapists do, and especially among therapists who work with children it tends to be a specialist area.

I love the variety in my job and the range of things that I do.  I only work with children, but each one is different, and I love putting the pieces of the jigsaw together to work out what is causing the difficulty and what is going to work best for each individual child and their family!

What do you think?  We’re there are any surprises here about what speech and lanuguage therapists do?

Using an iPad in speech therapy by Elizabeth

I purchased my iPad last year “for work” and I love it and the children I work with love it. It rarely leaves my side.  I don’t think it can replace real objects/ interactions and indeed it shouldn’t; but it is a useful addition to any therapy kit. Both Helen and I are trying to find a good range of apps to use with all the different children we work with.

We have both previously talked about different apps we have come across and find useful. But today I wanted to write about a different challenge; using the iPad with children with behavioural issues. I have yet to come across a child who hasn’t enjoyed a game or motivator on the iPad.  I have found that for children with reduced attention spans the iPad is great at engaging them.  The only difficulty can be putting it away and not letting them use it for the entire session.  However I’m sure many of us have children we think would like it, but sometimes wonder how to introduce it.

Firstly, I have a good screen protector and a sturdy case on my iPad, to avoid problems with sticky fingers or accidental knocks.  So far, so good!

The children I have found it more challenging to introduce to are those that are very controlling of a new situation, those that don’t like change and those that get obsessive about technology.  I have visions of my lovely iPad being launched across the room!  I have found the important thing is to set ground rules about the use of the iPad.  These rules must be appropriate for the child’s understanding.

For children with a lower level of understanding, I find it best to hang onto the iPad at all times!  I also try to cover up the button with my hand so they can’t close the app.  With one child it has taken nearly 4 months to get to point where he can concentrate on the games and listen to the instructions without getting cross that he couldn’t have the computer and do what he wanted to.  At this point I would put the iPad away, even if he kept requesting it.  Each week I would give it as a choice, and he did normally choose it. Initially he would only tolerate 1 or 2 turns in the app I had chosen.  Now he is able to demonstrate understanding of 1ICW (information carrying word) of nouns and verbs on the iPad, which he is still unable to do with real objects.  He is also able to show an understanding of basic links between vocabulary.

Another good tip is to have the app ready if you need to change settings.  Nothing is more frustrating for the child than having to wait while you change settings!  Also don’t be afraid of holding the child’s hand to guide them, particularly if their fine motor control is poor.

For children with more understanding, I may allow them to have the iPad on the table in front of them, but introduce rules such, “Only Elizabeth touches the button”, or “No touching the button”.  I also insist that I choose when the game/app is finished; not the child.  For those that get overly engrossed, I also work on turn taking and encourage eye contact – this should still be an interactive experience!  I have also found for some children that a rule about listening first, touching second, can help. Otherwise they are busy pressing or selecting items and haven’t listened to the instruction or what you asked them to do.

So, if you are feeling brave, have a go. I have found the iPad to be a great therapy tool for children of all ability levels. Do you have any tips or strategies when using an iPad in therapy?

I have not been paid or asked to write this review. I am just sharing ideas I have found work.

Squiggles – an app review by Helen

I love finding new apps that I can use with the kids I see. Like technology or hate it, there are few things that motivate as well as a really good app! I can’t take the credit for finding this one though – I did a joint session with another SLT recently and she had this one on her iPad. It’s been a huge hit with the kids I see since I downloaded it, as well as with my own daughter!

The concept of Lazoo Squiggles is very simple. It’s a basic drawing app with a twist. There are 13 different pictures – faces, birds, cars, rockets etc. It tells you what to do – eg draw squiggle nests for the birds, or draw squiggles to make the cars go. You can change the colour and style of the lines as you go. When you’ve completed it, you can press the Go button in the top right corner and they move. Eg the cars zoom across the screen, the nests spin and the birds lay eggs which hatch… You can also add stickers to the pictures and move them around. Kids of various ages love it as you can make it as simple or complicated as you like! No drawing skill required, which makes it perfect for me as I’m somewhat artistically challenged!

There’s also a free drawing screen where you can draw any picture or pattern you like and when you press the Go button, it spins round and round.

I found this video about the app online, check it out for more information.

And the best thing of all about this app – it’s free!

So, how can you use this app in therapy? Here are a few ideas:-

• It’s a great motivator for speech sound work (add a new bit to the picture each time you say a word/ sound sequence/ sentence).

• Work on colour – draw orange squiggles…. Draw squiggles on the blue rocket…

• Work on prepositions – eg put a sticker on the rocket, draw squiggles under the clouds etc.

• Use it for making choices – there are quite a few images to choose from.

• Use it for prediction skills – what will happen when I press go? (Some are obvious and some have an added surprise!)

• You can save completed pictures, so you could save one and use it as an expressive language activity the next time – get the child to describe the picture they made.

Can you think of any more ideas?

No-one has asked me to write this review – I’m just sharing something I find useful in therapy!