Part 2 of 2
Three’s a Crowd & Four’s a Party
It’s most likely that if your child is receiving speech therapy services at school, they are doing so in a group setting. Kids in the group may or may not be targeting similar therapeutic goals.
Imagine hearing, “Students: I’ll be modeling ‘How to Play Cards’ this session, but one of you will learn Gin Rummy, the other Poker, and Timmy, you’ll learn to play Hearts.”
Private speech sessions are typically one-to-one; whereas 100% of the SLP’s attention is focused on your child the entire 45-60 minute session. Home Programs, like these, are included with each session. After the session, parents are walked through the homework, and given suggestions on how to implement strategies for increased carryover of newly learned skills.
Caseloads & Workloads
It wouldn’t be uncommon for a School-Based SLP to provide services to 95 children in one week. At Chatterboxes, a full-time therapist provides 25-30 visits per week on average.
Aside from designing and executing therapy to her caseload of 95 students, the School-Based SLP is also responsible for attending IEP meetings and writing and revising IEP Reports for each student. High caseloads reduce a therapist’s availability of time for planning.
Whole Child Approach
At Chatterboxes, our private model gives us the ability for our Speech-Pathologists to carry lower caseloads while allowing for the therapist to treat the ‘whole child.”
At Chatterboxes, we incorporate a child’s daily hobbies and interests, such as home-life, siblings, family happenings, into the child’s Weekly Therapy and Home Program.
With parental permission, we involve the child’s teachers, babysitters, or siblings into our Therapy Program. Ensuring that all the people involved in the child’s life are educated on his or her goals and implementing strategies consistently provides the support a child needs to make progress.
While making therapy meaningful and relevant to a child’s interest and life from a subject perspective, our private-based model to treat the Whole-Child allows for a child to experience increased progress & carryover newly learned skills outside the therapy environment.
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“To the doctor, the child is a typhoid patient; to the playground supervisor, a first
baseman; to the teacher, a learner of arithmetic. At times, he may be different things to
each of these specialists, but too rarely is he a whole child to any of them.”
—From the 1930 report of the White House
Conference on Children and Youth
Interested in learning more about our practice? Visit: www.TeamChatterboxes.com