School-age Stuttering Therapy: A burden, a challenge, or an opportunity?

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Re: First grade child who stutter

From: Scott
Date: 14 Oct 2012
Time: 13:15:51 -0500
Remote Name: 108.17.124.241

Comments

hi Heba - Thanks for your post...On the bullying question, I'd like to refer you to the other paper on the ISAD conference about bullying, along with our friends and colleagues Bill Murphy and Bob Quesal. In terms of how to explain this all to 1st graders... This is an important question-- we have to make sure the concepts we present are understandable and accessible to young minds. Many clinicians find that the use of analogies can help -- we use lots of analogies in therapy. In particular, we like analogies that tie the speech behavior to nonspeech activities that the child does on a regular basis like throwing a ball, riding a bike, coloring, jumping, playing computer games, etc... After the child understands the analogy in these types of terms, we can highlight how it is similar to talking. So, if one is talking about physical tension for example, we can first introduce the concept of tension in muscles used for shooting a basket -- if the muscles are too tight, the child won't be able to make the basket. Then, we tie that to speech muscles... We find that it helps to spend a lot of time laying a solid foundation for the child's understanding...with younger children, we can't simply introduce techniques and expect younger children to be able to understand them, let alone use them. My personal belief is that we haven't spent enough time, as a field, laying the foundation... we get too eager to work on the fluency and forget to provide the background... If we do this, however, we find that even complex concepts can be explained in a way that young minds can understand. (For example, see Mr. Rogers - he talked with young children about the most advanced topics, yet in a way that they could process and learn from... What a true educational gift for children - and for us as therapists!) Thanks again for reading! -S


Last changed: 10/22/12