How to Help Families Carry Over Speech Therapy Work at Home

Below are the links to the products that were talked about in the Speechie show:

• Website: Speech and Language at Home
• Teachers Pay Teachers store
• Facebook: Speech and Language at Home Facebook
• Facebook Groups: Let’s Talk Infants and Toddlers and Free Material and Ideas Exchange for SLPs

If you’d rather listen to the audio version of the Speechie Show, click here:

Or if you prefer to read the transcript, see below:

Welcome to the Speechie Show! Being a speech-language pathologist often means having too much work and not enough planning time. To beat the overwhelm, we’re bringing you the tricks and tools that will make your job a little bit easier.

Carrie: Hello everybody and welcome back to the Speechie Show.  I am your host Carrie Clark from speechandlanguagekids.com and today we are talking about increasing parent and family engagement and helping out with carry over. We’re here today with Lia Kurtin from speechandlanguageathome.com right?

Lia:  Right.

Carrie:   Welcome and thank you so much for being on the show today.

Lia:   Thank you for having me, Carrie.

Carrie:   Absolutely.  If you are joining us on Facebook Live we did have a false start hahaha. So hopefully everybody who was trying to watch that one will come on over and watch this one. This is our second go at it. We were trying to get the cool new Facebook Live two and one feature going but it didn’t work out for us today. Next time. But today we’re here and we got the Skype call going so we’re good to go. So, we are going to share with you today some tips for increasing parent and family caregiver engagement and having them help in the therapy process. We all know that that can increase the speed that are children make progress in therapy. So excited to talk about this topic today.

If you are new to the show my name is Carrie Clark and I am from speechandlanguagekids.com. And this is the Speechie Show. We do this once a week. We have a new guest on each week and we talk about whatever topic is interesting to that guest and hopefully will interest all of you, as well. So, if you are watching with us on Facebook Live go ahead and type what setting you are working with. So are you working with preschoolers, early intervention, we want to make sure we’re getting the right information to you. So, go ahead and type that in the comments. And while they’re doing that Lia, why don’t you go ahead and tell our guests or our audience a little bit more about you.

Lia:   Okay so, I am a speech and language pathologist in Denver and I worked in the school setting for about 15 years. So, I saw kids from preschool all the way up to high school. And then about 4 years ago I switched to home health. So, I started seeing little ones like birth to three. But I still see kids who continue to have a diagnosis where they need therapy at home so I also see older kids on my caseload, as well.

Carrie:   Perfect. And tell us a little bit about speechandlanguageathome.com.

Lia:   So when I made this transition, I realized that it was really important to help connect with families. So, I wanted a resource that I could share with them. So, I started a website and I started making materials and I wanted to share those. So, I’m sharing them on Teachers Pay Teachers because there’s not really a lot out there for early intervention.  So that’s what I kind of have been building up my website to help families and caregivers and other professionals, as well.

Carrie:   That’s great. It’s so wonderful to have more resources out there so that we can share with everyone else. Okay let’s see we’ve got a lot of people chiming in. We’ve got outpatient pediatric clinic, middle school and early intervention, K through 6, elementary school, preschool through fifth grade and elementary 1 through 6. So, we’ve got a lot of span there. So, we’ve got a lot of different people joining us and we will share some tips that will help all of you today. So, we’re going to go ahead and get started with our five tips for you today on increasing caregiver and family participation in the therapy process. If you have any questions as we go along please type them into Facebook Live and we will answer those as we go. All right so our first tip today then is to think about our families as learners. Lia, tell me what it means when you think of families as learners.

Lia:   Well when I switched settings I really had to do some more research because this was a new setting for me and I learned how important it was to really… we are really the educators and support for families. So, we can come in and do therapy but it’s more important if they understand what we’re doing. So, I had to learn a lot about that relationship and how we see the families and learner’s. That might mean that they really have to see what’s in it for them. So, families really want to know why you’re coming into their home. How is it going to benefit them? And that’s important in the school as well, too, because you can communicate at home and they might be a little bit faster than spending more time in class. So, it’s really important to communicate that to the families.

Carrie:   Absolutely. I think a lot of times when we’re in the home, sometimes it just looks like we’re playing and they don’t really understand the meaning behind it. So of course, they’re not going to say, oh well, the speech therapist played with you I should go play with you. But if we can really give that education and teach them about the process you’re right, you’re going to get better by in.

Lia:  Exactly.

Carrie:   Wonderful. Alright so that’s our first tip. Thinking about those families as learners. Getting them on board with the process educationally. And then the next step is going to be to provide a variety of resources. What kind of resources do you look for …click here to read the full transcript.