Product Review: Silly /R/ Sound Prompting Pictures by SpeechPage Publishing Company

I recently accomplished a small miracle.  I helped a child struggling to say his "R" sound produce it correctly at the sentence level!  We worked on that tricky sound before vowels and after vowels, in the consonant and consonant vowel levels, and later in the phrase to short sentence levels. Whew!  And then, POOF! Just like that, we are on to working on his sentence level productions of all /R/ sounds in all positions of words during conversational speech!  I am so happy about this progress and of course the child and his parents are too! We will not miss that /w/ sound substitution that he use to make AT ALL!

Now what?  Well, I would be cutting his therapy short if we stopped now, so we just started working on carryover and conversational speech levels.  I must make sure that this sound that we have worked SO VERY HARD ON the last few months will now carry over into his conversational speech and his school and home environments.  That's the ultimate goal of articulation therapy of course!  The great thing is that I have the most perfect therapy item to do this too.  I have the Silly /R/ Sound Prompting Pictures from SpeechPage.  They are colorful and fun and each one helps me to elicit speech at the sentence and sometimes the conversational speech level. Simply said, they are AWESOME!  Here's some helpful information about them:

-They can be easily ordered online from SpeechPage.com Publishing Co. or by filling out an order form found in their catalog and mailing it into Speech Page Publishing Co. P.O. Box 356, North Olmsted, OH 44070, or faxing it into them at: 1-904-216-5478. 

 Link to their awesome site where you can obtain a current catalog or review materials available online. 

- They arrive laminated and 3- hole punched!  Isn't that great?  That way, I can immediately organize them into a 3-ring binder and know that I can use them over and over again because they are sturdy and protected. 

-You receive 36 different silly situations on 6 different pages when you order this fantastic product! There's so many that I do this activity over a few therapy sessions with the same student and not have to present pictures that he has seen before. 

-They have fun and colorful pictures that elicit a variety of responses from my students.  We often find ourselves laughing at how silly and creative they can be!  This makes therapy fun and interactive.  The best part is that students than enjoy speech therapy don't mind coming back to do more work another day. 

-They almost always elicit a sentence or longer response from the students.  (That's my favorite thing because its that natural conversational speech that is often the hardest for me to elicit targeted speech from). 

Here's how they work:
I have them look at a picture like the one shown in the example below and ask questions like: What is wrong in the picture? How should things be? What might happen next?  The student in return responds with an answer and that answer almost always has the targeted sound in it. Please see the picture the below.  It was with this picture that  I was able to hear the hard to elicit medial /r/ sound from the words, "arrow" and "carrot".  My student said, "I would get rid of that carrot and use a real arrow." I was so happy to hear his targeted medial /r/ sound in a word in a sentence response to know that it was what a expected, a bit still "w" sounding.  We will continue to work on the medial /r/ sound in words during conversational speech next time, but that's OK!  I have more pictures to use from my Silly /R/ Sound Prompting Pictures to use.  Yay! 

Silly Scene Talk!
/R/ Sound Prompting Picture
SpeechPage Publishing Co.

I'm so glad that I could share with you one my favorite products for eliciting spontaneous speech! Silly /R/ Scenes are great and I would recommend that you try them out in your own therapy room too! 
Have a great day! 
Sincerely, 
Manda, SLP