I really enjoy watching how many of us speech language pathologists are following our passions and sharing our work with each other to improve the lives of kids! I’m sharing the best off-the -shelf kids’ products to make therapy fun while advancing speech and language skills, Jenna Rayburn at speechroomnews.blogspot.com is incredibly creative in designing fun activities for school based therapy using things like french fries boxes from McDonald’s or canning jar lids, Katie Kelley is providing thorough reviews of apps that liven up therapy on peachyspeech.com and Heidi Hanks of mommyspeechtherapy.com has a host of free articulation worksheets and information for parents and therapists.

Heidi provided us with the outstanding app, Articulation Station, last year and now has offered us a free “Articulation Screener” to quickly assess a child between 2 and 8 years old. She has organized the test words by approximate age of mastery beginning with /p/ at the age or 2 through/th/ at the age of 7. All of the target word images are on 2 pages so are easy to use with a scoring box where you total the number of errors and see what age approximation corresponds with that number.

I find it is a great tool to use and show to a parent either when deciding whether to do a full evaluation or in the middle of ongoing therapy to see how a child is progressing. I even gave it to a grandmother who is monitoring her 2 and 4 year-old grandchildren’s sound production. She was relieved to have some norms so she didn’t have  to worry about “Baa Baa Ba eep” anymore.

Let me know what websites provide you with great ideas and tools for therapy!