Sometimes you need your client to buckle down, pay attention and work hard, but that’s the last thing they want to do. Here’s a way to motivate a reluctant child to try their hardest. 

—- Useful Links —-

Simple Tools: 
Marshmallow Bow
Catapult
Balloon Shooter

Amazon (non-affiliate)
Pop Up Pirate
Porcupine Pop
Frog Poppers
Crocodile Dentist
Slap Rockets
Stomp Rockets

Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

Denise: Learning to manipulate sounds in your mind is hard for these kids. I mean, it’s really hard and it’s tiring to their brain.

Welcome to The Mindful SLP, the show that explores simple but powerful therapy techniques for optimal outcomes. I’m Denise Stratton, a pediatric speech language pathologist of 30 years. I’m closer to the end of my career than the beginning. And along the way, I’ve worked long and hard to become a better therapist.

Join me and I’ll do my best to make your journey smoother. I found the best therapy comes from employing simple techniques with a generous helping of mindfulness. Joining me in the conversation is Dan, my technical wizard and office manager.

Dan: Welcome back to The Mindful SLP. Today, we’re going to be talking about motivation.

The title of this podcast is Work Hard, Play Hard. Now this sounds like something that’s going to be way more encompassing than just therapy because you hear work hard, play hard all over the place. I’m curious to see what Denise has to say about work hard, play hard and how we can use it as motivation in therapy.

Denise: I use what I call work hard, play hard for the in-betweeners. And by that, I mean clients who have aged out of play therapy, that I typically do with preschool and kindergarten, but they aren’t quite mature enough to have their own progress be the reward. Sometimes I have clients with me long enough that we’re kinda like, oh, you don’t need to do this kind of indirect play quite so much, we can focus a little bit more directly on what you’re doing. And they’re like, wait a minute. I like those. I like those toys a lot. It might also be for clients who are spending a lot of time in the mass practice stage of articulation therapy.

Dan: What do you mean by mass practice?

Denise: It’s drill. So lots and lots of repetitions of a motor movement to be successful. Yeah. So pulling out a game like Don’t Break the Ice is just going to be a distraction for them because they won’t get enough repetitions to really help them move forward. I do bring games back in with older kids, but it has to be when they’re ready, when they’re more at a conversational level, well sometimes you just don’t jump into a sound at the conversation level, right?

Dan: Yeah. Cause they’ll, they’ll try and find ways to use this as a great distraction. Now we talked about this a little last week. In your Case of the Complicated K. She’s been reading way too many mysteries, folks. In that complicated K case, you had a client who was really having to… he was struggling to keep motivated because he was having a hard time with all the basic stuff. And it’s not exciting. How did you use that?

Denise: Well, this came to me one day when I realized we accomplished nothing today, I had them for 30 minutes, we accomplished nothing. He was really orally defensive, we were doing some desensitization with a tongue depressor, a toothette, just getting it in his mouth was so hard for him. And so he was going everywhere.

Dan: Even trying to escape.

Denise: I had to do something different. I thought, okay, what can we do? And that’s when I came up with my work hard play hard routine.

Dan: Okay, tell me about this.

Denise: I made a list of several very quick fun activities I have that can be played very quickly, put away very quickly.

And when they work hard for ten minute, they’ll get to play hard for three. And then we can repeat it. Most of my therapy sessions are 30 minutes and that way I’m guaranteed at least 20 minutes of their concentration. Now, granted, that’s only two-thirds of a thirty minute session. I can tell you that twenty minutes of focus with some inbetweeners, it’s much better than thirty minutes of semi-attention.

Dan: Yeah, well, that makes lot of sense. What kind of activities do you use that are really quick and fun? And in and out fast?

Denise: I’ve got my catapult, um, I’ve got a Nerf gun, stocked up on balls for reloading. It was just great that you can have a lot of those, you can buy extra balls. Plus mine always get lost behind the desk and everything.

Dan: I wondered why every time I vacuum I find balls all over the place.

Denise: Pop the Porcupine, the marshmallow bow, the marshmallow bow can be done in three minutes, if you load it quickly. So you just got to manage that, um, frog poppers, stump, rockets, crocodile dentist, by the way, I have some Simple Tools videos about some of these really simple, fun activities.

And I’ll link that in the show notes. So I have a list of about ten, and they choose what they want to do before we even start working. So that way there’s no discussion between the work and the play transition. It’s already decided.

Dan: And they know what their reward’s gonna be.

Denise: Yeah, and when I let them play, I let them play with abandon. I mean, I’m not expecting them to say anything for this, I don’t say something for this marshmallow. I mean, I used the marshmallow bow the other way. Sometimes when I’m not doing work hard, play hard. And we say something for each marshmallow, we put in the tube, this is not that. This is you play with abandon, balls, marshmallows fly everywhere for three minutes and we don’t care.

Dan: And they have fun.

Denise: So it’s important that you keep your end of the bargain about play hard. As you promised, you give me your full focus and concentration for ten minutes, and then you can just be wild or whatever. And I set a timer on my watch for both the work part and play part and we adhere to it.

Dan: That’s great. Okay.

Denise: Then it’s rinse and repeat, cause you can do it twice in a session.

Dan: How’s that all worked out?

Denise: It’s been really successful for the clients I need it for. So the one we talked about last week who just needed to play hard after tolerating oral stimulation, it worked really well for him. And it works well for clients who are in some stages of working on phonological or phonemic awareness because after listening really intently, they need a break. And that makes sense. I mean, learning to manipulate sounds in your mind is hard for these kids. I mean, it’s really hard and it’s tiring to their brain.

Dan: Yeah. And they probably haven’t had a whole lot of extended focus time in their life as it is up to this point. So, I mean, they’re young.

Denise: Well, they’re good at using distraction, right and breaking kind of the concentration, and you know, that’s part of perhaps learning disability. I have one client who will talk about anything and everything to avoid work, and he’s really good at it. So right now this is the only method that really works for him because he’s just in that stage where he needs to do lots of mass practice, lots of phonemic awareness.

He’s got to listen to himself a lot, things that he doesn’t want to do. Things that require a lot of auditory attention for him. I don’t use it nearly as much with clients who are working just on narrative language or older clients who’re doing other things like a story that someone tells is self-reinforcing, so you don’t need the work hard, play hard for that. And usually like third grade and above, they usually find their own success to be their own reward.

Dan: They’re starting to get that, that skill worked out. So these in-betweeners, but then it sounds like they eventually will move past this work, hard, play hard.

Denise: Yes. It doesn’t last forever. This is a fun story about my client that we talked about last week, working on the K and G. So he just told me that he doesn’t need games anymore. He said, I think my mom brought me here to learn how to say the things I couldn’t say. I’m fine without games. And it was kind of like, he’s like, I kinda just want to get it done. And of course, part of that was his huge success with K, I mean he finally got it and he’s like so motivated and I was like, oh wow, I can do this.

And so we just realized this, I could drop the games. He gets this attitude, let’s just get her done. Yeah, that’s good. So eventually you get the whole thirty minutes of their time working when they get older.

Dan: That’s a nice transition. Well, this is an interesting technique. I have in the business world, heard a lot of different, productivity techniques that kind of look like this. There’s one out there called Pomodoro. It’s actually Italian for tomato. And the reason that is called Pomodoro is that the person who came up with this had a, a little kitchen timer in the shape of a tomato that you twist the top and you can set the timer for cooking. And she was having a hard time with, with this.

And so she set the timer for twenty minutes and at the end of twenty minutes, when the timer went off, uh, she got to do whatever she wanted to do for five minutes. And then she would reset the timer for another twenty minutes and do that another, you know, she called them Pomodoro’s.

Denise: I guess that’s what work hard play hard is.

Dan: It really is, and, you know, I’ve found in my, my career, my profession, especially right now, I work with constant interruptions. I’m getting phone calls from all over the place and I can go the entire day and not get anything done.

Denise: Yeah, you are kinda like some of my ADD clients.

Dan: I have to do this at times too. I have to turn everything off and get away from all the distractions and just focus and say, okay, I’m going to come back to this in twenty minutes, and then I can go be distracted for ten minutes and watch a YouTube video or whatever, and then I come back and go for another twenty minutes. So this is not just for kids.

Denise: By the way, I will make a list of those activities, if you want them. I have about ten. They’re really simple. They’re really fun. You can use them for more than just work hard, play hard, and we’ll have them in our free resource library at slpproadvisor.com slash free.

Dan: Okay. Are you suggesting this for me so I can start shooting marshmallows around the office?

Denise: If you work hard.

Dan: All right. Look out everybody at the office, there’s going to be marshmallows flying. Thanks for listening to this week. And remember, every time-

Denise: You master the simple, the complex takes care of itself.

Dan: Have a great week. We’ll talk to you next time. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the mindful SLP. We invite you to sign up for our free resource library at slpproadvisor.com slash free.

You’ll get access to some of Denise’s best tracking tools, mindfulness activities, and other great resources to take your therapy to the next level. All this is for free at SLP proadvisor.com/free. If you enjoyed this podcast, subscribe, and please leave us a review on apple podcasts and other podcast directories.