Can speech therapy be done in 5 minutes? Should it be done in 5 minutes? Speech-language pathologist Carrie Clark explores how long a speech session should be at home or in speech therapy. Plus, Carrie discusses the merits of the 5-minute speech session model and how it is helping some SLPs reduce the number of minutes each child is seen while shortening the amount of total time they are in speech therapy.
News/Updates
- Back to school
- Printable Products for Therapy or Home practice
- Currently all free except e-books
- www.SpeechAndLanguageKids.com/products
How Long Should Speech Therapy Sessions Last?
- All kids are different, each one needs different about. Talk to speech therapist
- Basic Learning
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- More practice is better
- More repetitions are better (re-train brain and muscles)
- Doesn’t help to practice the wrong way
- Willingham in 2002 found: distributed practice (shorter more frequent sessions) were more effective than mass practice (longer, less frequent sessions)
- Shorter session require attention for a shorter time, fewer inappropriate behaviors
- ASHA Preschool NOMS: Articulation, Pragmatics, and Cognitive Orientation did better with individual therapy, didn’t matter for spoken language production and comprehension
- Kids in groups often get fewer reps
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- Groups are needed for some skills
- What do we want?
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- A lot of repetitions of the correct way per session
- shorter sessions
- individual sessions
- Home Practice:
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- Good news for parents, you can do this easily!
- Use what your SLP gives you, or find the hardest level of a skill that your child can do successfully
- Do short practice sessions with many reps
- Limit distractions, just one-on-one with your child
- My Experience: Do best with 2 times per day for 5-10 minutes per session
- For SLPs: To make maximum progress, send homework that is the hardest level the child can do independently and instruct parents to run through the skill 2x per day
- How to Do as SLP in School?
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- High caseload, each child has many minutes, need to group to get them all in, possibly scheduled at multiple schools throughout the week
- www.5minutekids.com has a very cool idea
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- 5-minute sessions
- several times per week
- individual therapy
- Research on their website about how it works (don’t know if this research is peer reviewed but definitely worth looking into):
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- Students went from avg 210 minutes per month of therapy to 35 minutes per month (16% of the time)
- Went from average of 15 months in therapy to 9.5 months (finished in 63% of the time)
- Whoa!
- Key is getting a whole bunch of repetitions in a short amount of time and doing that more frequently (50-100 reps per session)
- How many sessions?
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- Mild Disorder 2-3 sessions weekly
- Moderate Disorder 3-4 sessions weekly
- Severe Disorder 4-5 sessions weekly
- If only schedule in school 2 days per week, do 2x per day, 2 days per week
- If you do this, each child will have fewer total minutes but progress faster
- Study was done on speech sounds but could be used for language as well
- How to get that many reps in without child losing interest:
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- www.5minutekids.com has games you can play
- One idea from them is to have a bag full of coins. One coin is red. Child and therapist take turns pulling out coins (child says word before each coin). If the red coin is pulled, that person has to put all of their coins back (bankrupt!). Person with the most coins at the end of 5 minutes wins.
- Do motor challenges while they say their words:
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- How many of your words can you say (correctly) while holding this yoga pose? Have a selection of yoga poses to choose from. I like yoga pretzels cards or look some up online
- How many words can you say while doing a motor task like standing on one foot?
- Trace lines or shapes with dry erase markers while saying words
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Another Approach: Speedy Speech
I just spoke with the owners of “Speedy Speech” which is another program for shorter, individual speech sessions. Here’s what she has to say about their program (which looks awesome in my opinion!)
Speedy Speech™ has a…
- Step-by-Step Manual,
- the Auditory Bombardment is organized in minimal triplet sets,
- 4 sections of Auditory Discrimination sets on one page,
- and the colorful picture, work/phrase/sentence are on one page organized in one and two syllable sections.
- Also included is a reproducible yearly calendar,
- parent and teacher letters to introduce the program and for any changes,
- and parent/student rating scale.
- The Therapy Log form is designed to help track individual progress and evaluate/measure student performance on a session by session basis. It is organized for quick and easy data entry.
We designed the program so that a SLP sees the child for approximately 10 minutes, included the relevant homework review, drill, marks the Log Sheet and is finished for the day. No nightly/weekend work! No looking for activities, lessons, games, homework, etc. Start the next session where you left off. The work was ALL done for an SLP. Teachers and parents love the quickness of not having the child out of the classroom and students out of therapy in less time. All data, research driven.
The HOME page is http://www.speedyspeechtherapy.com/index.html and the PROGRAM SAMPLE page is http://www.speedyspeechtherapy.com/ProgramSamples.html
Thanks for Listening!
As always, I would love for you to leave an honest review on i-Tunes so we can get the word out about this podcast. As a thank you, I am giving away a free copy of my e-book about how to teach a new speech sound to anyone who leaves me an honest review on i-Tunes. You can claim that free e-book by visiting www.SpeechAndLanguageKids.com/podcastoffer
Reference:
Willingham, D (2002) Allocating Student Study Time: Massed versus “Distributed”
Practice American Educator
www.aft.org/pubsreports/american_educator/summer2002/askthecognitivescientist
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Thank you. I have move to distributed practice for my students with CAS and have had positive results. Thank you for providing some research which is always helpful when trying to convince parents and educators.
Absolutely! I’m glad you’ve seen some success with a model like this. I think it can be very useful, especially for kiddos with CAS.
Very interesting idea – but I see a problem with logistics. You would almost have to block out a thirty minute period (ok, maybe 20), to get the students to the therapy room, have five full actual minutes of uninterrupted therapy, and take care of data collection. But still, not a bad idea! I like like the ‘concentrated’ dose!
I believe the way these therapists did it was to go to the classroom and pull the child just outside into the hallway, do the therapy quickly and send them back into class. If you took quick data while the child was practicing, you should be able to get away with just a minute or two between classrooms as you move on to the next room and then a few minutes at the end of the day to collect all of the data. They also talk about how planning would be shorter because you don’t have to plan some elaborate game to keep the children interested. I think it would be possible to do this in less time than the traditional model but you may have to come up with some creative ways to rethink old habits. Definitely worth thinking about though!
At the end of last year, during annual reviews, I scheduled 2 students for this delivery model for the upcoming year. The parents were very happy with the concept. Thanks for the resources! And by the way, my baby is the same age as yours…and we’re also not getting any sleep!
That’s great! (about the scheduling, not the sleeping!) Let me know how that works for those kiddos! I hope that we both start getting some more sleep soon though! Good luck!!
Hi Carrie- another great program is Speedy Speech. You can check out the all-inclusive programs at http://www.speedyspeechtherapy.com. Speedy Speech™ is an all-inclusive, evidence-based Speech Therapy program that will revolutionize your therapeutic sessions and improve how you remediate articulation errors.
This innovative program is designed to help children correct speech errors quickly and efficiently through short 5-10 minute, one-on-one drill sessions. The Speedy Speech™ program incorporates the latest therapeutic techniques in the field of Speech-Language Pathology and is fully modifiable to meet your specific therapy needs. It contains all the materials you need to conduct drill burst, intensive artic therapy.
Our programs are available for both speech professionals and parents, and include all of the materials necessary for instruction. I am the Speedy Speech program educator for the Midwest and I would be happy to consult with any SLP or school district on how to implement this amazing program into your school caseload. I am a full-time SLP based in public schools and I use Speedy Speech; our co-op’s team of SLP’s have made the transition and have seen great success. We either see students outside of the classroom door or push in to the classroom. We also use it for RTI.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or want additional information! Thanks for all the great info on your website. I just downloaded your ‘where ?’ file folder game and used it today!
Kim Power, M.S. CCC-SLP
This is perfect, thanks Kim! I have suddenly had a lot of people asking about this but I didn’t know anything about it. I’m so glad you mentioned this. I encourage everyone to follow the link and check it out!
What are the differences between speedy speech and 5 minute speech?
I’m not familiar with the speedy speech program but from a quick glance at the website it looks like it follows the same premise. Just a different commercial program describing the same technique, I think.
I am very interested in this model and have been experimenting with it the last two years. I have used both programs and while the idea of shorter more frequent sessions is very similar, there is definitely a difference in the materials. I started out using the 5 minute kids program but I recently got Speedy Speech and I think it’s much better because of how the words are grouped together in near-minimal triplet sets. As opposed to just randomly selected target sound words, the Speedy Speech program groups the words based on phonemic characteristics. Not only does this help with auditory discrimination, but it also feels like it has an integrated motor piece with the repetitive oral movements made when saying the words in the sequence presented… Which also makes it great for your apraxia kids. I just started with this program this year, but so far I see my kids making very fast progress. I also like that the book gives you suggestions of how you can use the words and colorful pictures for language. It also includes teacher/parent letters and a years worth of homework which is an amazing time saver. Currently some of the classroom teachers in my school are starting to use it for RTI and they seem to be getting good results. Lastly, Speedy Speech is very systematic and super easy to follow. It’s very easy to collect data and the kids take pride in seeing how they progress from session to session.
That’s awesome! Thank you so much for sharing your experiences with those programs. I’m not familiar with speedy speech so I’ll have to look into it! Thanks for the comment!
Looks interesting, but how do you bill for the sessions? Most school districts bill Medicaid and I believe it has to be in 15 minute increments. How does this system work with billing?
That is a good question that I don’t know the answer to! Many school SLPs are doing it this way so I would start asking around in Facebook groups or other social outlets and see if you can get someone who’s doing it!