The Cycles Therapy Approach for Children who are Very Hard to Understand

If you haven’t tried the Cycles Approach to phonology therapy yet, you’re missing out!

This is an amazing therapy method that is especially designed for children who are highly unintelligible and who have multiple phonological processes, or sound errors.

The idea is that you take all of the speech skills they need to work on, and you cycle through targeting each one for a week or two before moving onto the next.

The result is that these children make faster progress and their WHOLE speech system improves more quickly than if you’re only targeting one sound.

I’m Carrie Clark and on this episode of The Speech and Language Kids Podcast, I’m going to tell you exactly how to use The Cycles Approach in therapy and show you where you can download some pre-made materials to make it happen.

Listen to the Podcast Here

You can listen to the full podcast episode below:

What is The Cycles Approach to Phonology?

The Cycles Phonological Remediation Approach was created by Barbara Hodson as a way to help children with many phonological processes make faster progress in speech therapy.

Her research showed that children can improve intelligibility faster by cycling through all of the different phonological processes that they need to target.

Each phonological process (or sound error pattern) that they struggle with is targeted for a short time before moving on to the next one.

Hodson laid out an amazing program that walks you through the steps.

What Phonological Processes Do you Target First?

Hodson was very specific on this!

You start with the primary set.

The key is to only include targets that the child is stimulable for, meaning that they can do it if you help them.

If they are completely incapable of saying a certain sound, you don’t include that on round one. You can check it again for round two.

What are the Primary Set Targets for the Cycles Approach?

Syllable deletion: make sure each syllable is marked, even if not all sounds are present
Sound deletion (FCD, ICD)
/s/ clusters: significantly improves intelligibility
Fronting/Backing (Anterior/Posterior Contrasts): Work on velars if fronting or alveolars/labials if backing
Liquids are targeted at the end of each cycle even if they aren’t stimulable (this is the only exception to the stimulability rule): Target /l/ and /r/ (by emphasizing vowel to suppress the /w/ substitution, go for an approximation)

Start Round One:

Include any of the targets on the primary set list above that they are currently struggling with in conversation and that they are stimulable for.

For each process you choose, choose at least 2 phonemes to practice with (make sure they are stimulable).

For example, if you are targeting final consonant deletion, you could pick final /t/ and final /p/.

Each phoneme you choose is targeted for 60 minutes of therapy (about 1-2 weeks).

Here’s the planning page from our therapy kit. You can see that you simply check 1-3 phonemes/targets for each process they’re struggling with and that’s what you’ll use for your first cycle:

What to Do in Therapy During the Cycles Approach

As I mentioned, each phoneme will be targeted for one week or 60 minutes of therapy.

Here’s what to do during each session:

Review: review previous session’s words
Auditory Bombardment: Clinician reads list of 12 words that contain the target for 1-2 minutes
Target Word Cards: Choose 3-5 words that contain the target that the child is able to say with help. Paste them onto index cards
Practice: Practice those 3-5 words over and over again during play
Stimulability Probe: Take a few minutes to probe for stimulability on next week’s words so you know what to print out for next week.
Auditory Bombardment: Repeat step 2
Home Program: Send home the flashcards you made with instructions to have parents practice those words 2 minutes per day.