The clinic I work at is moving this week and the movers came early and took my desk, table, chairs and most of my supplies. So in honor of my lack of materials, I have another list:
Four weird ways to motivate your clients when you have abso-flippin’ nothin’ left in your speech cabinets
1. Speech Picnic: Spread a blanket on the floor. This works really well to help define the empty room’s space. I actually had a snack that I’d picked up at the gas station to work on pragmatics and “picnic vocabulary” I think it would have been fun to use paper plates and print out therapy targets and glue them onto the plates during the activity. I didn’t have glue or paper plates since they’ve all been moved but gas station snacks work nicely in an emergency.
2. Visualization Exercises: Today is April 18th-30 days AFTER the official start of Spring. We had blizzard-like conditions for most of the day. So while on our speech picnic, we practiced our visualization activities and pretended like it was a lake outside are window. We talked about how we were going to go swimming and pretended to build a sandcastle. We made sure to replenish our sunscreen so we didn’t get burned.
3. Go Water-skiing: I think all of that extra floor sitting made me a little giddy. I had one child who was having a hard time paying attention. So we went water-skiing. I was the boat, and she was the skier. She had to follow me with her hands out like they were on the rope while we motored around the room. Sometimes I would yell “crash” and she would have to fall over. It ended up being a fun activity that helped her refocus on following my directions.
4. Roll to your speech Targets: Without tables or chairs, we ended up with ALOT of space. So we could put speech sound cards on both sides and the client would roll (like a log) to one side to say a certain number of cards and then roll to the other side to say more cards.
What weird or creative ideas have you used to motivate your kids?
