How to Get Started with Literacy Based Therapy

Do you want to provide literacy based therapy but you're not sure where to get started? I'm here to help!

What is literacy based speech therapy?

Literacy-based speech therapy is utilizing activities that promote literacy during speech and language therapy. Incorporating literacy-based therapy into your speech and language sessions can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Speech and language skills are the foundations of learning to read, so you can easily provide crossover in any therapy session to expose children to literacy. Here are a few examples:

• Use read alouds to target goals like answering questions or building vocabulary
• Use short stories to target decoding and speech production
• Add phonological skills like rhyming or sound identification in your speech sound therapy
• Wordless picture books are a great way to work on describing and syntax

There are TONS of professional resources out there that can help you navigate, but one must have is Literacy Based Speech and Language Therapy Activities by Prath and Palafox. It is a very practical book on this topic, as you can take it and implement the ideas immediately.

Why should I use literacy based activities?

Literacy-based intervention has been shown, through various types of research, to be effective for improving oral language skills. Thus, incorporating literacy tasks into your speech therapy sessions is extremely important. Children who have speech and language disorders are at increased risk for reading difficulties. While our scope of practice includes providing services in the area of reading, often it is left up to reading teachers to address these skills. But for increased positive outcomes for our students, we should be addressing them in therapy too.

Who benefits?

You can begin incorporating literacy skills into your therapy at a very young age! Emergent literacy is the skills children gain before they begin to read and write for themselves, such as print awareness and listening to stories. We know how important early intervention is, so addressing these skills, even in your youngest clients, is beneficial. When I worked in the schools, I used books with preschool up to 8th graders.

How do I start?

Planning therapy around a book or story is not hard at all, and there are plenty of things to make it easier. I like using book companions to extend a story or target specific goals. This saves me a lot of time and I can easily use one book to last several sessions, even if I am working in a group.

If you've never done literacy-based therapy before, choose one group or client to start with. Take a look at what goals you want to target, then choose a book. Don't worry too much about book levels, you can easily skip parts or change vocabulary during a read-aloud if it is too hard. If you are really unsure, talk to the media specialist or to the classroom teacher to get an idea of what might be a good choice. You can check out this list to see my top ten favorite books to use in therapy.

Then just start! You will learn what your kids just because you're a great SLP. Talk to other SLPs, collaborate with teachers, read up on the topic and you will continue to improve your literacy-based intervention.

Join the CSW Book Club!

Do you want literacy-based therapy ideas delivered to your inbox each month? Sign up for our book club! You will get instant access to a free Language in Literacy ebook with great tips. And at the start of each month, you will receive book suggestions to use in therapy and a free book guide.