Treatment Tools and Approaches

Animal assisted speech, language or feeding therapy is the planned inclusion of an animal in a patient’s treatment session. The animals, and interactions with them, can be used to:

• Increase client motivation and participation in treatment.
• Provide an engaging and meaningful way to target the 5 main areas that SLPs treat (speech, language, social communication, cognitive-communication and swallowing).

Animals we work with include horses, donkeys, sheep, goats, chickens, rabbits, cats, and dogs.

The Developmental, Individual Difference, Relationship-based (DIR®) Model is used to help build healthy foundations for social, emotional, and intellectual capacities. This in turn helps to develop critical cognitive, social, emotional, language, and motor skills, as well as a sense of self.

Research related to the DIRFloortime model supports its effectiveness in improving the core challenges of autism including relating, interacting, and communicating while decreasing caregiver stress and improving parent-child relationships.

Hippotherapy refers to the inclusion of purposefully manipulated equine movement in a speech session for the purposes of:

• Engaging sensory, neuromotor and cognitive systems to promote functional outcomes.
• Increasing client motivation, engagement and participation in treatment. 
• Providing graded and rhythmic input to support the systems that impact the 5 main areas that SLPs treat (speech, language, social communication, cognitive-communication and swallowing).

 Speech/language therapy in the pool is available in July and August.   

Speech therapy in the pool can be used to:

• Provide a language rich and motivating activity for speech and language therapy.
• Increase joint attention and attention to a task (a foundation for building strong language skills). 
• Perform lip and mouth closure.
• Improve verbalization, articulation, descriptive language and sentence richness.
• Encourage play and social interaction.

PROMPT© stands for "Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic  Targets".  It is a dynamic tactile method, used for the treatment of motor speech disorders.  PROMPT is highly effective for improving speech and helping patients develop sounds because it provides visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic and proprioceptive cues the speech system.
PROMPT© is used for the following reasons:

• To develop an interactive focus or awareness for oral communication.
• To develop an integrated, tactile-kinesthetic associative mapping for cognitive or linguistic concepts.
• To develop, balance or restructure speech subsystems at the sound, word or phrase level.

 AAC includes all of the ways that we share our ideas and feelings without talking.  We are able to assess, select and implement AAC use for our clients.  We help our clients learn to use AAC across environments and activities.  Our therapists have experience with various forms of AAC, including:

• Communication boards
• LAMP
• Tobii Dynavox
• TouchChat
• Proloquo2Go 
• GoTalk
• CoreScanner
• Eye gaze systems
• And many more