To mark the 100th episode, Dan (our business manager) interviews Denise about her favorite episodes, the beginnings of the podcast, and what the future holds for The Speech Umbrella.

— Useful Links —
Free Resource Library
Where Everybody Knows Your Name 
Interview with Char Boshart 
Interview with Dr. Shereen Lim 
To Infinity and Beyond 
The Power of Too 
Follow the Narrative Road 
The Conversation Game 
Phonological Awareness Tracking Tool 
Impossible R Made Possible 
Simple Tools 
Interview with Dr. Teresa Ukrainetz
Making Movies, Making Inferences 
Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

Denise: Welcome to the Speech Umbrella, the show that explores simple but powerful therapy techniques for optimal outcomes. I’m Denise Stratton, a pediatric speech language pathologist of 30 plus 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 as we explore the many topics that fall under our umbrellas as SLPs. I want to make your journey smoother. I found the best therapy comes from employing simple techniques with a generous helping of mindfulness.

Dan: Welcome to the Speech Umbrella Podcast. We are so glad you’re here today. It is a very momentous podcast episode today, it is number 100. Kind of hard to believe that Denise has been doing this for a hundred episodes now, but today we’re gonna do a little different format. I’m going to be interviewing Denise and kind of returning a little bit to our roots, where I used to do it. I’m Dan Stratton. I am Denise’s business manager and, you know, husband.

We’re going to talk a little bit about Denise’s path with the Speech Umbrella. So Denise, tell us first about starting the Speech Umbrella. Now when you first started, it wasn’t even the Speech Umbrella, was it?

Denise: No, we’ve rebranded like two or three times, a very painful process, but I’m happy with the name Speech Umbrella.

You know the movie The Grinch with Jim Carrey?

Dan: Mm hmm,

Denise: Where he says, solve world hunger, tell no one. Well, when I solved the R problem for me, which was a huge problem, I wanted to tell every SLP who also struggled with the R problem, this is how you can do it. This really works. I found a process, something that I never learned in college, and here’s how to do it.

So I wrote a book and then because it just seemed to be very valuable for people to see me actually eliciting R and showing the steps I went through to prepare a client’s oral motor system to say R, that’s why I made the video course.

So that sounds so easy. How long did it take you to write the book?

A couple years, maybe? I don’t remember. I worked on it off and on.

Dan: And then how about the video course?

Denise: I’ve conveniently forgotten how long it took. Let me

Dan: tell you, it was two long years.

Denise: But we did re record some videos because at that time I didn’t have a teleprompter and I actually memorized large chunks of information. I don’t know how I did it. I look back at now and go, why did I even do that? It was,

Dan: it was a lot of long nights that we spent on that.

Denise: And funny story, there were a couple of times where I said mascara smeared down on my cheek. We have to redo it. Normally, I don’t even wear mascara. It irritates my contacts, but you have to look really nice when you’re on video.

I do the makeup pretty seriously because the lights wash you out so much. Yeah. The mascara ended up all over my face and I’m like, we’re redoing

Dan: it. That was, yes, it became part of the, uh, okay. We got the sound going, we got the camera rolling, we got the script ready. Do a mascara check. Okay, now you can talk.

Alright, but yeah, I agree. The course, after editing all the video for the course, I do agree. The course is fantastic because of that ability for a speech therapist to look right over your shoulder and to, to see how the client does it. I almost feel like I, after doing the editing twice of the entire course, I feel like I could almost do R therapy myself, that’s how good it is, everybody. But, uh, so then you had the course and then you decided, okay, you’re going to release this thing. And then what happened? The pandemic.

Denise: That’s true, the pandemic. In a lot of places we’re putting material out for free or almost next to nothing on the internet because of the pandemic, not a great time to release a course I decided to start a podcast to help get the word out.

And that’s how the speech umbrella podcast got started. Plus, I always have these conversations going on in my mind, internally, all the time, so I thought it would be easy to just open up my mouth and say it, which is totally not true. It is not true. This is a scientific topic, speech therapy, and so I have to research and check up everything I say just to make sure I’m saying it right.

And so many times I got led down another path because of something I discovered while I was researching something else.

Dan: I remember there were a few episodes where you started one direction and came back an entirely different one. And so there’s a several times we rerecorded a podcast because you learn more. And it was, it was an interesting thing. We started the podcast well in July is when we first Uh, the first podcast episode launched in July of 2020, and you’ve recorded and released 99 episodes now. What are some of your favorite topics?

Denise: I love talking about self monitoring. It is so, so important for our clients to be able to monitor themselves.

And I’ve just discovered lots of cool ways to do that. That’s a cool topic. I really like talking about mindfulness and yes, it used to be called the Mindful SLP because building a relationship with a client and being really mindful of where they are as far as their self regulation is just so, so helpful to helping your client move forward.

And let me just mention a few of my favorite episodes that weren’t interviews. I love all the interviews I did, but these are a few of my favorite episodes that were just me. One is called The Conversation Game, and that’s number 50. Now, I love it partly because the idea of how I do The Conversation Game was totally unique to me.

I have never heard of anyone else approaching teaching conversation skills that way, and I still haven’t heard of anyone doing it that way, and it works so well. It really, really works. I like the episode Follow the Narrative Road because it’s so important to do things in the right order. And as important as it is to teach our kids to tell stories, you need to make sure your clients are ready.

And that’s a way to get them ready to start telling stories. So those are two episodes that I really like that I did.

Dan: I’d forgotten that it was originally called the Mindful SLP. Why did you change the name to the Speech Umbrella?

Denise: There was someone else who had the Mindful SLP, so I was only using it for the podcast and I wasn’t using it for my materials, and that just didn’t make sense. Plus I felt the Speech Umbrella embodies more of what I do. I don’t just talk about mindfulness, I talk about everything. So let’s just call it the Umbrella. I can’t stay to one place, I just bounce around, so.

Dan: Well, as you researched and did all these episodes, what speech related things surprised you, surprised you the most while doing it?

Denise: I’ve been thinking about this. And one thing that has really surprised me is the importance of the sound N. Now, stay with me here. When I interviewed Char Boshart she talked about how that spot where our tongue is, where it rests up there, the spot basically where we say N, is the central operating place for all of our speech.

Our tongue is up there. And then when I interviewed Shereen Lim. She talked about how the end spot, you know, we do call it the alveolar ridge, but she called it the N spot. When a kid’s tongue is up there, it’s sending messages via neurotransmitters to their brain that help them with lots of positive things and self regulation behavior and all sorts of cool stuff.

I’m like, wow, that is so cool. And then this is my own discovery, my own observation. As I’ve been working with clients on phonological awareness and doing syllable analysis, where they’re breaking apart a three syllable word, taking off the first syllable perhaps, and repeating the last two syllables, how often they omit N.

It’s like they don’t hear it. It’s like they don’t process it. For example, take the word tornado. And the way this syllable drill would go is you would say to them, say tornado, and they would say tornado. And then you would say, now say it without tor. And they are supposed to say nado, right? But I can almost predict they will leave that N out, or they’ll leave the whole syllable out when it starts with an N and they’ll go tor do.

1. Okay. It happens with all sounds, but it happens a lot, a lot, a lot with N. So I think there’s some connection there.

Dan: Any other things that surprised you?

Denise: How critical early listening and phonological awareness are in addition to oral motor skills. So I came up with this analogy that a client who’s on this speech therapy road, and I’m talking about like maybe 80 or 90 percent of your clients, there are a few exceptions, but they are on this road that starts with their motor skills and moves into their early listening and phonological awareness skills. So on this road, there’s on this journey and you have the weather of the day and that’s their social emotional state and some clients have stormy and cloudy weather, some clients have sunny weather. Some clients have a mix of the stormy and cloudy and sunny weather and you have to take all that into consideration as you’re working with your clients. I believe I know why we have this divide in our speech therapy world.

I feel we have the oral motor camp and the phonological awareness camp, and the two do not meet. They really should because it’s just different parts of the road. It’s different parts of the same journey. But if you have seen, as I have seen, how, how effective PROMPT can be, how life changing PROMPT can be for some clients, you might think it’s all oral motor. That’s just, that just solves about everything.

And if you have seen how truly effective phonological awareness is, when you really dive down into it and get doing the really, really important things. Then you’re all in that camp. Oh, yeah, this solves everything. Well, you need to know where your client is on the road and see the value of both camps.

And so that’s been a huge discovery for me. And I’ve figured out how to determine where a client is on that road and where to intervene.

Dan: How many years have you been, I mean, I know you took PROMPT training in a long time ago, 2017, 2016, something like that. A long time ago. And you didn’t really hear about phonological awareness until you were doing a podcast, is that right?

Denise: Well, I’ve always heard about phonological awareness. We’ve always talked about that, but I started developing some specific phonological awareness tools and you might even call them early listening when I was still working at the school district, but I just had a couple and I knew they worked really well.

And what happened is I started realizing that I was so scattered, in knowing where a client was in specific phonological awareness skills. And I was just trying to track it without having a tracking form. That’s when I made my phonological awareness tracking tool. And I put it all together and I started gathering all this information.

And this is the order I’ll do it in. And it’s based on research. What I did is I put in some of specific steps specific to speech therapy. Because these tools I were using are created for using in a classroom. So for kids who are more typically developing and our clients need some really specific steps to help them really grasp the concept.

So that’s why my approach is a little bit different. It puts in specific things and that’s when I really tuned into how important phonological awareness is and early listening. Cause I start there, start with early listening. And I’ve seen some amazing, amazing benefits from using it. So that’s how it all came about that I started beating the drum of phonological awareness all the time.

Dan: And so it’s really, when you start bringing both of those together of the PROMPT and the phonological awareness, this has really made your clients make some great progress.

Denise: Yeah. Well, I got to the point where. When I first started using PROMPT and I had so many kids who were done like that, I was like, Oh gosh, you’re done.

I love PROMPT, I love PROMPT, you’re done. And then I ran into the kids who got to a certain point and they were doing pretty well in PROMPT and pretty well with just minor cues. Even when I wasn’t giving them tactile cues, which is what PROMPT is about, but I still needed minor cues. They could never become independent of that.

I was like, okay, what’s going on? What’s going on? All of a sudden this prompt hasn’t, you know, had the same effect. And obviously they needed more, they needed phonological awareness. And so when I got good enough at PROMPT to really help kids fast, who didn’t need the phonological awareness, that’s when I started to see the divide and that they needed something different.

Dan: You already talked a bit about some of your favorite episodes, but I want to ask you, what would you consider to be the hidden gems of the Speech Umbrella? If you had a brand new SLP, just out of college, what would be the things that you would want to make sure they listen to?

Denise: Well, I have some Simple Tools videos that I think are hidden gems.

I put a lot of work into them. They’re really helpful. I have some parent videos, which parents can watch on how to prepare their child to say the R sound, which by the way, will also work for L. And those are really, really valuable. And some of my videos have made it onto Instagram, but a lot of these videos are too long. They’re too long for Instagram, but they’re great how to’s like for a therapist just starting out, what am I going to do? You pull up those Simple Tools videos, which are on my website. So those are some hidden gems. Um, I have a ton of self monitoring ideas. Um, a lot of those did make it onto Instagram.

But some of them are in the podcast. Some of them are on Simple Tools. And also, I was thinking of hidden gems like small little things. I’ve done a couple podcasts on small words. And how important small words are like To Infinity and Beyond about the Infinitive to, which I had never really thought about till recently, and Adverbial Too, which I started thinking of even later. And I have noticed as kids are telling stories how important it is to have those two words. The Infinitive To, which describes a plan, and the Adverbial Too, which is comparing and contrasting. Oh, they’re so important. So those are some hidden gems. I like to think there’s a lot more.

Dan: You’ve done a few interviews over the past 99 episodes. What are some of the most valuable things you learned from talking with others?

Denise: Well, from Shereen Lim, who is a dentist, and she wrote a book called Breathe, Sleep, Thrive, I learned that we can intervene really pretty early in palate expansion.

And if you can expand a child’s palate when it’s still so moldable, they may not need braces at all. And the problem we end up with is it’s the custom to wait to a certain stage before putting braces in, and then they have to pull the child’s teeth to make room for the teeth to move. And her point is, you know, we shouldn’t be pulling teeth.

We need to intervene earlier. So, that was, that was really cool. I mean, if we do things right, most kids wouldn’t need braces. Interesting. Yeah, really interesting. And here’s another really cool tip I learned from Char Boshart. Because our tongues are vertically elevated when we talk. You know, towards the N spot. When you’re just looking at someone talk, you should not see the surface of their tongue very much. Hardly at all. Isn’t that interesting? Because our tongue is just kind of hiding up there. And what a nice quick check to look at someone if you’re wondering, do they have a correct oral resting posture when their mouth is closed?

I mean, sometimes you can’t tell. Sometimes I can see a child doesn’t have a correct oral resting posture. Sometimes I can’t. They get really good at closing their teeth, at closing their lips, but their tongue is still down. Well, if you watch them talk, and if you’re seeing the surface of their tongue a lot, that’s a great clue.

Very interesting. And from Teresa Ukranetz, I learned how to really do Sketch and Speak right. Because I wasn’t doing it exactly right. And Sketch and Speak is such a powerful tool. I turned one client totally off of Sketch and Speak because I didn’t realize it was supposed to be a shared reading experience. And the reading material was too hard for her.

But she really wanted to talk about red pandas, but trying to find easy reading material on Red Pandas, I couldn’t, and I should have made it a shared reading experience. Instead, she just got discouraged and she didn’t want to ever do Sketch and Speak again. And I also learned from Teresa Ukrainetz, it’s how important it is when you’re doing Sketch and Speak to have them rehearse the sentence that they craft, the sentence they come up with, and you help them craft it so it is grammatically correct.

They need to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. They’re working on their auditory memory. In that session, that sentence needs to be the same. Now, they might come back the next session, and you haven’t finished the Sketch and Speak, and they might say it a different way, which is fine. You help them craft it. But within that session, they need to repeat it the same way. And that really helps them learn how the syntax should go, how the grammar should go. And they’ll just get confused if you let them say it a different way every time. And I have carried that over into when I have kids narrate movies, and we make little movies, by the way, which they love.

I have an episode about that, Making Movies, Making Inferences. That’s been a very powerful tool, because they are so excited to see their own movies. But I also have them rehearse it the same way. Once they figure out how they’re going to say it, because otherwise they tie themselves in knots. They, I said it this way once, I said it this way once, and then they kind of try and mesh the two together, and it does not work.

Dan: I, I have to admit, I, because I do work at home, I get to participate a little bit in the therapy, and it’s always fun for when the kids do get to watch their movies, because I am up there making the popcorn. I get a little text from Denise saying, okay, popcorn time. Then I have to go make the popcorn, get it all ready for, you know, it flows quickly and easily right into the movie. But it’s, you know, it’s, it’s very gratifying to watch these kids make their own movies, uh, as I helped, you know, with some of the editing and things like that, it’s, it’s really neat to see the progress they make in, in doing that. I think it’s a. It’s a really fun activity.

Denise: Oh, they’re so excited. They’re bouncing up and down on movie day. They have these huge grins on their faces.

Dan: Obviously, you’re very comfortable in speech therapy and running a clinic and everything, but this whole online business aspect of the speech umbrella has been very different. What have you found most gratifying from doing the online business?

Denise: Well, people actually listen to the podcast. That’s very gratifying. But do we have more than 13, 000 downloads or something like that?

Dan: Yeah, more than 13, 000 downloads at this point.

Denise: And people actually buy my materials. So that’s gratifying. Uh, some people have told me how much they appreciate me helping them figure out R, for example. So I’m like, yay! We all need to figure that out. We should have been taught that in college, but we didn’t get it. So now we have it. It’s just gratifying to have a voice. And I have learned so much because I go down these different roads as I try and make sure I don’t say something wrong. And then I get a new idea and I pursue it and I get new ideas. So I have learned a whole lot, but it’s kind of like drinking from a fire hose to be honest.

Dan: Mm hmm. What were you not prepared for?

Denise: The time. I thought because I have these internal conversations going on in my head all the time, that I could just speak and they would come out well organized. Oh, I was so wrong. I have to script these podcasts. Except for this one, I don’t quite have to script because you’re interviewing me. It’s much easier to be the person being interviewed. So, a lot of time, a lot of editing.

Dan: It does take a lot of time. I think one of the things that surprised me the most uh, was the international audience. I truly expected this podcast to only be listened to in the United States. But our number two listening location is in Australia. And if you added it up, Australia is a definite second place. Solid, very solid. It’s like the three cities that are in Australia are in the top five of all listening cities. It’s fascinating to me. There’s a lot of people in England, Canada. It’s, it’s fascinating. We’ve, we’ve literally heard from all over the world.

And in some countries even where they don’t speak English, and I’m surprised that there’s somebody listening there even. I always want to find out why, what do they find it, what do they find in the podcast that interests them? Well, we do have a little announcement that you want to make about the Speech Umbrella. Uh, it is taking a lot of time. What is the future for the Speech Umbrella podcast?

Denise: Well, I’m going to take a break from podcasting. I found out that life doesn’t stop when you have a podcast, but a podcast never sleeps. It’s a serious time commitment, and I let other things slide, thinking I would eventually catch up on them, but eventually those things accumulated. And I found myself just wanting life to stop just so I could catch my breath. Life, of course, doesn’t stop. If I were writing a book, it would have an ending chapter, right? Mm hmm. And I just started really, really wishing I had a final chapter to the podcast. Well, I’m in charge of the podcast. I can’t have a final chapter.

I’m considering this rather like a book with a hundred chapters and it’s not that I’ll never come back and do another podcast It’s just it’s not gonna be Regular like this and it’s not gonna be for a while because I need a little bit of a break. But I’ve really really appreciated the listeners Everything that I’ve learned while podcasting. It’s been a great experience. I’m a better writer, I learned that you write and then you throw half of it away. So my early podcasts. I apologize. They’re too long. I wasn’t a good editor.

Dan: I think everybody who does a podcast wishes that nobody ever could listen to their early episodes. There’s 100 episodes out there.

Uh, we find that people go back and listen to them regularly. Uh, when a new listener comes on, we can always tell because they download 20, 30, 40, we even had one person who downloaded all 75 episodes in one day, which I don’t know how they would ever listen to them in one day, but, uh, you know, but they were very interested in the backlog.

And it is very relevant, and that’s one of the beautiful things of this podcast, is you can go back at any time and pick up more information. But is this it? No more episodes ever?

Denise: No, like I said, I do plan on doing podcasts, occasionally. But I think there really is a good backlog. I took so much time to make sure every podcast was quality.

I never just wanted to throw something out there just because I needed a podcast. I have listened to some speech therapy podcasts where I felt the information was not valuable, perhaps. Um, I never wanted to do that. So I poured my heart and soul into these hundred episodes.

Dan: And they’re good ones. So, you know, I think everyone can look forward to maybe some here or there.

So, keep it in your podcast feed so that you can get any new episodes when they do arrive. Because they will be a little bit more sporadic and you won’t know when they’re coming. And we will send out an email to everybody who’s on the email list. So, if you want to get on the email list, go to the speechumbrella. com and sign up for the free resource library and that will put you on the mailing list and then you’ll know whenever a new episode comes out.

Denise: And by the way, the free resource library is a great resource. It’s one of those hidden gems. That’s still going to be up. I’m still going to have a website. I’m still going to sell materials, you know, all that will still be there.

Dan: So what’s next for the Speech Umbrella? What are you going to focus on next? After you rest, of course.

Denise: I want to finish the course I’ve been working on, on phonological awareness. I have so many great materials I’ve created. It really works. It’s super effective, like I talked about, but I don’t think people will understand how to use the materials without me creating a course.

But I’m going to do it differently from the R course, which I packaged all these chapters together and I know it’s a time commitment for people to get through the whole R course. I’ve seen some people get bogged down because I can see where they are in the course. So the phonological awareness course will be in individual courses that you can buy.

Dan: Small bite sized pieces to the whole apple.

Denise: Yes, and you might not need the whole apple. You might be very familiar with some of the phonological awareness stuff that is more advanced because I think more people are, but you may not know what I do with early listening, which I found to be really, really perhaps the most valuable piece.

So that’s how I’m going to market it. And I think that will be better. Now, I’m also going to work on my Simple Tells. And Simple Tells is a collection of 50 simple stories with a regular cast of characters. In the episode where Everybody Knows Your Name, I talked about lowering the cognitive load for some of my clients who couldn’t remember character names.

And I did that by creating stories with the same characters. So that’s how the stories begin, and I just kept writing them as I needed more. There’s ten stories for each character. So I have a Wanda Witch character, and she’s got ten stories. And I have a Peter Pig character, and he’s got ten stories. And so on and so forth.

And a couple of the stories, there’s a couple of the characters that interact, but mostly it’s just the one character. I found a terrific artist to illustrate them and she is more than halfway through these stories as we speak. And these stories are simple enough for your earliest storyteller. And they’ve been tried and tested in my clinic and the kids love them.

And 50 stories is enough to get you through a year. Because you know, we all take a couple weeks off here and there. And so that is what is awesome. I have a whole year’s worth of stories and I love them. I use them every week, every, every week with a lot of clients.

Dan: So you’re not like going back into the office of your speech clinic and you’re just like going to ignore the rest of the world.

You still want to hear from everybody out there who is listening to the speech umbrella. What do you want to learn? What do you want to hear about their world?

Denise: Well, I’m still on Instagram. I’m still on Facebook. And I’d love to talk about almost anything. There’s PROMPT, there’s autism, there’s natural language acquisition, narratives, um Sketch and Speak, Myofunctional Therapy, Dyslexia, R Therapy, of course, Phonological Awareness, of course. Those are some areas I’m interested in, but really everything in our field interests me, especially on the pediatric level. So, yeah.

Dan: Come find you on social media. You also have an email address. Oh, yes. Denise at the speechumbrella. com.

Denise: I had to think for a minute. You never email yourself. How about that?

Well, because it’s not written right in front of me here. I can’t think what to say if it’s not written down, sometimes.

Dan: Okay, the last question I have for you is, you know, every year you, you field requests from some of the university students that we have here in the Valley. We have three different schools that have speech therapy.

But anyway, you always are talking to speech therapy students. What advice would you give to a someone who’s just out of school for a while, got a few months to years under their belt? What advice do you have to speech therapists? I’m putting her on the spot because I didn’t put this one on the script.

Denise: I always tell them get PROMPT trained and you can write your own ticket. You can work for yourself, you’ll be very valuable, but any kind of specialized training like that makes it more possible for you to work for yourself or in a private setting. And I love the schools. I worked for the schools for many years, but I just really loved being my own boss and less paperwork. So the PROMPT training really set me on that path.

I also love the Hanen More Than Words training. That was the first training I took that taught me to be mindful with kids with autism. And with all my clients, actually, when I thought I was really paying attention to them, taking the Hanen course made me realize that I wasn’t paying the deep kind of attention that I needed to.

And lately I’ve discovered Natural Language Acquisition to be a fantastic resource for the kids on the autism spectrum who are gestalt language processors. And I just did a really recent podcast on that. So I tell them, get more training than what you got at the university level. You’re never done. You’re never done. Those would be like my top three suggestions.

Dan: Mm hmm. All right. Well, we want to thank you, Denise, for 100 episodes of the Speech Umbrella. We’re looking forward to some more in the future. Hope you have a nice rest. I know you’re going to the Oregon coast to sit on the beach for a while.

I’m very glad to handle the luggage duties for you. We will look forward to talking to everybody a little bit in the future. Have a nice, uh, rest. Fill up on the back episodes, and if you have questions, or thoughts, or requests, please reach out to Denise at deniseatthespeechumbrella. com. Check out the free resource library, of course, at thespeechumbrella. com slash free. There are courses, there are all sorts of materials available for you in the store. You can also find Denise’s materials on Teachers Pay Teachers. And let us know what you need. We’re very interested in helping all the speech therapists out there. Denise, you have the last word.

Denise: Thank you so much for listening. And when you master the simple, the complex takes care of itself. Happy holidays.

Dan: Thanks for listening to the Speech Umbrella. We invite you to sign up for the free resource library at thespeechumbrella. com. 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 TheSpeechUmbrella. com. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, subscribe, and please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and other podcast directories.