Fluency Therapy Ideas

  • The following Fluency Therapy Ideas were posted to the mailing list GRNDRNDS in October 1998. Since it is a public mailing list, and does maintain an archive, the ideas posted are not "copyrighted" and are available to the public. To make it easier, I have extracted the ideas listed by these clinicians. Perhaps they can adapted by clinicians and student clinicians working with children with articulation disorders and looking for therapy ideas. This page is also translated with permission into French, Ukrainian, Indonesian, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Belarusian, Polish, Norwegian, Punjabi, Russian and Turkish

  • Posted to Stutt-l by Heather Grossman on December 16, 1999 -- Today I was lucky enough to supervise a great session lead by a quite talented student clinician in our center. I always assert that my best "tips" as a therapist have all come from clients, and I did learn one or two today.. Danielle works with a 23 year-male who stutters and recently began working with a 6 year-old who presents with severe struggle behaviors, situational avoidances and had already been using a variety of starters and word substitutions. This little guy had never met a person who stuttered and didn't believe us when we told him there were a whole bunch! We gave him a FRIENDS poster of famous PWS and his mother told us later that he told her it was not real.. and that I had been joking. Anyway, the student had these two clients meet together for a therapy session after their individual sessions, and it was the best! The clinician had prepared a list of questions with the younger client in his session so she was able to just sort of coach it without controlling. Some highlights were discussions about "not letting it upset you when your family doesn't understand your stuttering because they don't do it," and the older "cool" guy telling the child that "when you start to get good at other things, you get confidence, and you don't worry so much about stuttering because it's just a thing you DO and not who you are." He also confirmed for the child how absolutely hard it is to "slow down" but that it really helps him when he "stops, and tries to listen to himself speak like he was listening to another person." (His therapy tip!) He also told the child that "you don't get as frustrated when you stutter once you know you can speak and stutter in different ways." They discussed how hard it is to "tell someone you stutter when they ask why you are talking that way" but that "it helps you feel so much better when you do." They talked about how they agreed "therapy is only good if you can talk about your feelings." They spoke rather independently of the clinician for about 30 minutes, shook hands and thanked each other.. This was a great start toward empowering this child. The two of them got more out of that half hour of therapy with each other than I ever could have imagined. What a good day..

  • Posted by Debra Blanton to Stutt-L on June 4, 2002 -- I once had an 11 year-old boy come to me VERY UPSET because "everyone" was making fun of his stuttering and calling him stupid AND his reading teacher would not let him finish reading out loud. I made him write on the board what he was, but could not include stutterer. After he had written 21 things (i.e, son, boy, 'A' student, computer wiz, baseball player, nephew, etc) and that was all he could come up with, I then allowed him to write, "I stutter." He stepped back and said, "WOW, stuttering is only 1/22nd of me. It IS only part of who I am." Yes it draws attention to you, but then you get a chance to prove how great you are in other areas as well.

  • The following therapy ideas were gleaned from STAFF, a newsletter from Aaron's Associates, and added with permission of Janice Westbrook, editor

  • Lea Schauberger, April 12, 2003 - Activity for Dealing With Teasing
    Last modified June 10, 2018