Using a Reading Bucket Activity in School-Age Stuttering Therapy

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Re: Reading Bucket

From: K. Chmela
Date: 22 Oct 2009
Time: 18:47:46 -0500
Remote Name: 72.54.34.133

Comments

What awesome questions!! See answers below. I have picked up in the past that many people very much dislike the feeling of sounding unnatural. PWS tend to usually just do one or the other, pausing or slower rate. What are your thoughts and experience on this? This is a great questions. My thoughts come from my training from Dr. Gregory, June Campbell, and Diane Hill, as well as from my therapist when I was a teen, Mrs. Gregory. It is so important to approximate "normal sounding and feeling speech" as soon as you can. Dr. Gregory's interpretation of fluency shaping stressed that speech should have a slight easy relaxed approach, with the rest of the phrase "let go", followed by a pause. Pauses are what slows the rate, and they should be used in natural ways, more and less frequently. When working with children, I am constantly asking them if they "liked how something felt or sounded..", and if they say "No, it is weird," I say "Let's change it then." We try again until they are happy. It is very important for kids to realize that it is O.K. to make changes in speech and it is very important to sound the way you want to. Are kids reluctant to try this and generalize into the classroom, because it sounds "silly" to them? What we usually do after we have practiced this is we meet with the teacher and have the teacher practice reading with the child for one or two minutes alone each day. Many children say they worry because their teacher might "notice" they are doing something different with their speech when they read, and once we show and teach the teacher what we are working on, it seems to reduce reluctance and anxiety. Also, is there practice to generalize into conversational speech? If you think about it, everything we do in therapy is in the form of a hierarchy. So, you might make a hierarchy about a conversation about, say, soccer. Start with shorter to longer units of talking, and reinforce the child for what you want. Another step to the bucket? Thanks again for your article! I think the step by step progress of slowly lessening the support is well thought out.


Last changed: 10/22/09