Fluency (or stuttering) therapy is an area that many SLPs feel under-prepared to serve. While you may have had an excellent professor on the subject in grad school, it tends to be a lower incidence population in the school setting. In my career, I have had some years without any stuttering cases at all, and the most I have had is two or three at a time. It’s hard to know where to go with therapy and what materials to use when you don’t have much experience with it. It’s not that you need to have any special materials to work on stuttering therapy, but it’s helpful to have some ideas when you don’t know where to start.
Generally, I have three main things that I really focus on when working with fluency disorders.
1) I want my students to understand what stuttering is and what it is not. Ultimately, I want them to be able to advocate for themselves, and knowledge is power!
2) I want my students to learn different techniques to help them make their speech more smooth that they can use when they choose.
3) I want them to feel that the therapy room is a safe space, and to understand that everyone is different.
Really, this isn’t any different than how I approach therapy for any of my students, regardless of their goals. I want them to know what we’re working on and why, different techniques to work on it, to know that I care about them, and that everyone is different and may need help with different things.
Today, I would like to share my top 8 materials that I use in stuttering therapy with my older elementary and middle school students (about 2nd grade and up).
- My Stuttering Mini Unit. I created this because I was in desperate need of a systematic way to approach therapy with my older fluency students. There are several options out there for younger students, but I had a hard time finding anything with graphics and topics appropriate for students in third grade and older. This unit is where I start with any new fluency students. I really like using the pre-test to see what exactly each student knows – or doesn’t know – about stuttering. From there, it goes through some of the facts and myths about stuttering, and then introduces different fluency enhancing techniques, with activities to practice.
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- I always start my therapy year by using these Articulation, Phonology, and Fluency Student Self Rating Scales for both my students working on speech sounds and fluency. With options for both younger and older students, I feel like this gives me a much better picture of how my students view their own fluency skills – which often can be rather far off from my own outside perspective. This also helps me figure out which situations or settings may the most stressful for my students, so I can incorporate that into therapy.
- Books about stuttering. For my elementary students, I like to read the picture book called A Boy and His Jaguar by Alan Rabinowitz. While I am careful to talk about how the author grew up in a different time period with different views than we have now, it’s a book with a good message about overcoming the fear of speaking. The Stuttering Foundation also has a great book for younger students called, “Sometimes I Just Stutter,” which is available as a free e-book. For high school students, the book, “Out With It” by Katherine Preston is a good read. (There is definitely some mature content in that book, so I would recommend previewing it first.)
- An iPad. This is helpful to record students’ conversational speech to review together in therapy. You can use it to help practice things like classroom presentations, as well as access websites such as this stuttering trivia quiz or stuttering reactions game.
- Games with set phrases to say. For example, Uno is a great quick card game that has short phrases (ex: “I have a red four”) that you can use with different fluency enhancing techniques.
- Books with short stories or poems. These are great for talking about phrasing and pausing (especially in poetry) – which is something my students working on articulation often need help with as well.
- Games with more open-ended speech tasks, such as Tell Tale or Rory’s Story Cubes. These are good for more conversational practice, especially for students who aren’t naturally as talkative.
- These Stuttering Homework Calendars. These are great for quick and easy practice at home. They come with specific directions for parents to help them understand what you are working on in therapy, and how to support their child’s speech at home.
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PS: Want more therapy ideas for stuttering? Check out this post!
Enjoyed reading some of your day blogs tonight, and looking forward to reading more! Thk u for helping me and other SLPs with your ideas! 🙂
I love these ideas!
You seem like one of the good ones! As a PWS and SLP, you have stuttering therapy down;)