A tip for slowing down speech & a free "All About Me Worksheet"

Hi everyone,
I have a student who is a very fast talker.  He is only four and he loves cars, trains and anything boy! He needs cues to slow down his speech because when he talks super fast, he is almost impossible to understand! I tried using a pacing board with him last week, and I have also tried having him point to one syllable at a time on some multi-syllable word picture cards that I have, but those strategies did not seem to have an impact. That is when it hit me!  I decided to take out the cars that he loves so much and "park" them after we played with them a little while.  We gave them all a designated parking spot after working on his articulation goals together for the /K/ -/C/ sounds with words like:  "park" "car"and "truck" and then we turned the parked cars into a visual pacing board.  

He was asked to say one word as he tapped each parked car.  He repeated phrases about himself that we had developed from an "All About Me" poster that we had put together from one of our Twin Speech units called: "Back To School Speech & Language Unit" (see below for a free copy of that worksheet). He instantly slowed down his speech and repeated every single word in each sentence about himself with a slow and accurate rate.  It was wonderful to hear him say so much personal information about himself in such a slow and accurate way! It truly was a functional and productive therapy activity that I think may carry over into his life in a positive way.  It is so good for kids to be able to talk about themselves and have others understand what they are saying like their names, family members, grade that they are in etc.. 

The other nice thing is that I noticed that he continued to talk slow in general conversation when the task was completed.  

We had so much fun doing this and it was an activity that really seemed to help him.  I thought that I would share it to see if is something that you would like to try with your own students too.  

Best wishes, Manda, SLP
Twin Speech, Language & Literacy LLC  

*Click HERE or on the picture below to be directed to google docs to obtain your own copy of the All About Me page.