As speech therapists, we understand the importance of providing our patients with customized treatment plans that suit their individual needs. Whether it’s improving speech clarity or working on language development, we are dedicated to helping our patients achieve their communication goals.
Picture Your Progress
One tool we love to use in our therapy sessions are visual aids, specifically pictures! A picture is worth a thousand words, and nothing could be truer when it comes to speech therapy. Visual aids can help our patients, especially those with communication difficulties, understand instructions or concepts better.
Pictures for Different Purposes
Visual aids can come in many forms such as pictures, videos, and illustrations. For speech therapy, pictures are especially helpful as they can be used to achieve different purposes. Here are some ways we use pictures in our therapy sessions:
Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS)
PECS is a communication system used to support individuals with language and communication difficulties. It works by using pictures to teach an individual to communicate their wants and needs. As speech therapists, we use PECS as a tool to help our patients develop their communication skills.
Describing Pictures
Another way we use pictures in therapy sessions is by asking our patients to describe them. This helps our patients with language development and improves their ability to construct sentences. Additionally, it can help identify any difficulties patients may have with specific sounds or words.
Storytelling
Pictures can also be used to help our patients with storytelling. We ask our patients to describe the pictures and use them as a basis for creating a story. This activity helps our patients with their language skills, including vocabulary, sentence structure, and storytelling abilities.
Incorporating Pictures in Therapy: Examples
Here are some examples of how we incorporate pictures into our therapy sessions:
Picture Books
For language development, picture books are an excellent tool. We use age-appropriate picture books and ask our patients to describe the pictures, ask questions, and construct sentences about the story. The story can be re-read multiple times with different focuses each time to provide a comprehensive therapy session.
Food Choices
For our patients with difficulty understanding food choices, we use pictures to aid in food selection. For example, if a patient has trouble distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy food, we show them pictures of food items and teach them to identify which is which.
Sound Identification
If a child has difficulty identifying specific sounds or phonemes, we use pictures to support the sound identification. We provide pictures of objects such as “ball” and ask the child to identify the sound of the object name that they hear.
Conclusion
Pictures offer a versatile tool in speech therapy and can be highly effective in improving our patients’ communication abilities. The benefits of picture use are illustrated in all our activities and interventions, from PECS to story telling. As speech therapists, we use a tailored approach to ensure our patients receive customized experiences that drive them to the best results, and pictures are an integral part of that approach.
