It’s no secret that phonemic awareness plays a huge part in our clients’ success in both articulation and language. But what you may not know is just how specific and demanding the criteria for mastering phonemic awareness is. Typical assessments and programs don’t teach phonemic awareness in a way for our clients to reach the same level as their peers, and they may end up struggling for years to master speech and language skills. 

Dr. David Kilpatrick explores this topic in depth in his book Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. https://equippedforreadingsuccess.com/shop/ . He has also written a Manual to implement his phonemic awareness approach, Equipped for Reading Success. Since I have been using his approach I have seen “stuck” clients get unstuck and make great progress. 

In today’s podcast we talk about how phonemic awareness helped a couple of clients finally master the tricky R sound!

In case you don’t have time right now to dive into Dr. Kilpatrick’s books, I’ve made this Simple Tools video to get you started. 

Parents can do this too! This is a great way for parents to get involved in their child’s therapy, and the video is for them as well as speech language pathologists. 

As a final bonus, while I highly recommend the Equipped for Reading Success manual, I understand you may not want to invest in it until you see some proof. Dr. Kilpatick has made the original material that was part the U.S government studies on phonemic awareness available, since it is copyright free. This is the material Equipped for Reading Success is based on. The material is not as complete as what you will find in the manual, but it can be a great place to start. You can find that phonemic awareness material on https://www.speechumbrella.com/  in my free resource library. 

—- Podcast Links —–

Phonological Awareness for Parents
The PAST Assessment 
Equipped for Reading Success 
Foundations of R
More Than Tips and Tricks
Peaceful Speech 
Tally It Up 
The Tipping Point
Science Box

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

Transcript

Denise: Welcome to The Mindful SLP, the show that explore 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 another episode of The Mindful SLP. We really appreciate you coming and listening to us today.

We’re recording this podcast in September, which is of course the beginning of the school year here in the United States. And if you’re a school-based SLP, no doubt, the R kids are coming out of the woodwork. And even if you’re not in the schools, you no doubt have those kids who are really struggling with R. Some of those, you just might be banging your head against the wall on, well, there is hope. Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about R and phonemic awareness and the things that Denise has learned since she created her Impossible R Made Possible course. You’ve probably heard us talk about that. It’s available on SLP proadvisor.com.

Denise: It’s an online course, and it has videos of me working with clients, showing how to elicit R, showing how to prepare their motor systems to get ready to say R, because that is your first step. If the child doesn’t even have the motor capability to say R, then you’ve got to prepare them to do it. So Impossible R Made Possible, I feel does a really good job taking the therapist through looking at the child’s motor system. And this is how we prepare it. And this is how we elicit it. And then the second half of it, I do go through auditory processing and how children who aren’t hearing the R, need to learn how to hear it, because they haven’t been saying it for years. They’re not used to listening for it, but today we’re going to take an even deeper dive into phonemic awareness and learning to say R, or any other single sound articulation disorder a child might have. This applies across the board.

Dan: Yeah. We’ve had several podcast episodes about R and also about phonemic awareness. There’s Foundations of R, which is episode 17. That’s been a real popular one. It’s actually our second-most listened to episode and also More Than Tips and Tricks, which is episode 18 and then Peaceful Speech episode 19. Obviously this is something that Denise is very passionate about. So Denise, kind of tee it up a little bit today, what are we going to talk about today with R and phonemic awareness?

Denise: Why are we taking a deeper dive into this? Because I thought I’d covered it all in the Impossible R Made Possible course. Well, I keep learning.

Dan: That’s the great thing about being a speech therapist. There’s always more to learn.

Denise: And if you are a regular listener, you might have noticed that I mentioned David Kilpatrick’s book Equip for Reading Success quite often, you might even think I’m being paid to promote it.

Dan: We’re not, but you know, Dr. Kilpatrick, if you’d like to talk to us about that, of course, we’re probably going to continue to talk about it, even if you don’t, so that won’t work.

Denise: Why do I love it so much? I have found it useful beyond dyslexia, and I found it very, very useful for treating dyslexic. But for those kids who just aren’t generalizing…

Dan: There’s always those ones who just don’t generalize.

Denise: And in this case, it’s a couple of kids with R and I do have a really, really early podcast where I talked about videoing the kids and having them become like YouTube stars all the way, well you don’t really put it on YouTube and having them listen back and evaluate themselves and doing all that, which is really helpful, but these clients were teletherapy clients or one of them wasn’t every other time she came teletherapy client and that just did not work. And so I had needed something different and that pushed me to thinking, Hmm, this Equip for Reading Success, it has almost a minimal pair approach.

Some of the word lists are like, say the word bright and now say it again, but don’t say ‘er’ and they say bite, things like that. As, as speech therapists we’re very used to doing those minimal pairs, but this goes far beyond that and takes him into lots of different ways to analyze words. But my thinking was okay. I need something new. This isn’t working. Maybe I’ll try this Equip for Reading Success. The first client I want to talk about is Charlotte, and if you’re familiar with my Impossible R Made Possible Course, if you watched it, you’ll see her, she’s there on the video and you’ll also see me getting so excited when I say I just finished working with Charlotte, and she just crossed this bridge. She was like 40% accurate with vocalic R in conversation, which at that point I was like, yay. Yeah, you’re not going to go backwards from here. And I remember telling the listeners, the viewers. Yes, this works. I was so excited and the very next session she told me she had to stop for some personal reasons.

And I was like, oh, oh man, are you going to keep this? I’m not going to rerecord that video. That video was already in the can for you listeners, but it was, it was hard, but she did come back. It was like a year and a half later to finish up and she had regressed. Of course. And so working again, trying to get back where we were, and it was a real struggle.

Dan: So this was after you’d read David Kirkpatrick’s book that she came back.

Denise: That she came back, and I had his book Equipped for Reading Success. I give her that PAST assessment and she did really poorly on the upper levels and she told me it is really hard for me to think about how to change that word in her head. And I thought, well, that’s really interesting.

And so we started going through these lists. At first, she regained the R blends. I mean, she had been really, really solid on R blends when she stopped before an initial R like she was never missing at all, and that had regressed. So that was the first thing that came back. Vocalic R was a little bit harder, she still had some motor stuff going on and she actually recognized that she was pulling her tongue back unevenly inside her mouth. And since she was a teletherapy client, that was really, really hard to see. I could see that her muscles in her face weren’t quite coordinated and we’re working on that.

Anyway, she recognized that. She was able to correct that. And with the combination of those two, when she did say vocalic R, she could grab onto it, she could hold it in her mind. She knew that she had set it. ‘Cause it had been a sporadic since she had come back to resume therapy, she’d produce it every once in a while, and then it was there and it was gone. But because she had this phonemic awareness now, she heard that she was doing it. She could connect it with the motor thing she was doing. And there was a certain point where she just zoomed. It was like three weeks later, I was like, I think you’re done. You know the point, she reached the tipping point.

Oh, that is the name of that other podcast, where I talk about making videos with the kids and having new science experiments and go back and watch and evaluate their performance. So anyway, she reached the tipping point without having to do that. Yeah. And so that was my first really exciting experience with using Equip for Reading Success for something different.

Dan: Now we are related to Charlotte. So I was at a funeral a couple of weeks ago, Denise wasn’t with me, but, uh, I, but I went to this funeral and Charlotte spoke of course. Being, you know, involved with her therapy. I, I just listened very carefully as she spoke and she still got it. She still has her R’s, they’re still there. Yay.

Denise: Yay, and she was, released like four or five months ago. So yes, it stuck this time.

Dan: Okay, next client that you wanted to talk about?

Denise: So Nicole came to me right after she graduated from junior high. Therapist I know referred her to me because Nicole did not want to continue into high school having to go to the speech therapist.

She seemed really mild when she came, and I was like, okay, I’m thinking in my head three months and you’re done. I don’t know why you couldn’t quite finish up in the schools. I know the therapist who referred her, she’s excellent. And I thought, well, maybe she just didn’t get quite enough and tiny, tiny little motor thing.

And she was stimuable for all her vocalic R’s, and this is going to go fast. Well, it didn’t go fast. She just could not remember to say it. And all the other things that I have done, that I showed in the course, they just weren’t enough. I mean, they worked a little bit, but they weren’t enough. And even that Simple Tools video that I made called Tallied Up where I have bam, mark on a post-it note every time it’s an R, I created that for her and that worked and it got her a lot better when she was like reading. When the words were in front of her, and then she would remember to say the R, but when they were not in front of her, no. So I thought, well, let’s give her the PAST. She really bombed it, worse than Charlotte, much worse. And her processing, it was extremely slow. So what David Kilpatrick says is their responses need to be fast, right? If they’re not fast, then it’s not automatic, it’s not ingrained. And we speak fast too. So I’m kind of taking that and transferred over to how fast we speak and how fast we need to recognize that we’re going to put that sound in.

And where he’s talking about reading more, she was just slow. So I took her through Equip for Reading Success, she did not progress as quickly as Charlotte. She did progress, I got her all the way to the end. And this is the interesting thing. She never really reached the speed that Dr. Kilpatrick recommends, but I asked her mom any history of problems with English, reading, and her mom said no, in fact, I asked her twice cause I was like, I don’t want to miss anything.

And then. Nicole described to me, she told me the whole plot of Taming of the Shrew, which she read herself. And I was like, okay, if you can read Shakespeare…

Statistically, you’re an outlier. As far as this, having to process the sounds really quickly making you a good reader, but she still needed Equip for Reading Success in order to be equipped to hear herself saying the R or not saying the R rather, because what happened is it was the rrr sound. She generalized all the other sounds except for the rrr, the rrr in summer, the eee in first, the rrr in burst. They were dropping out all over the place where they were totally absent. So what I had to do after we got through Equip for Reading Success, then I had to read her to sentences.

Like I have the no glamour articulation book and it’s got all these sentences loaded with sounds. So I said, I’m going to, ‘kay, I’m going to read you the sentence and you tell me every word that has an R in it. And there would be like three to five. And the first thing I discovered is she wasn’t really good at repeating a sentence correctly. And it took her a long time. She really had to think, sometimes she asks me to repeat it. So there is something going on there. The first thing she got better at was just repeating the sentence accurately, correctly. And then she got better at recognizing the R’s. And I was just having her recognize any word with R in it.

Right. And then we narrowed it down to now you just have to tell me where you hear rrr. I’ve never been this specific with a client before, but this is what she needed. And it was really, really hard for her. I had to take each, we have our six vocalic R sounds and write them on different post-it notes. And then have her say, well, this word has air in this word has ear. And this word has ayre, she had to sort them out before she could sort them in her mind and then recognize that she was missing rrr. And then I read to her and I would do like one sentence at a time. And she had to pick out all the words with rrr in them.

Now, this sounds really crazy, but it’s the only thing that worked. And now, she’s almost at 50% and now I’m only measuring rrr in conversation, that’s all she’s missing. And so we’re almost to the tipping point of where she will be able to graduate from speech therapy. But in fact, her mom said an interesting thing when I said to her, okay. Nicole is not quite done. And we’ve had this discussion a couple of times because I’m like, oh, I think she’s almost done. Give me a couple more months. And then like, oh, sorry, sorry, mom. She’s not quite done. But her mom was really understanding when I explained the processing to her and said, yeah, she doesn’t have her driver’s license yet. Um, most of her friends do, she said, because she processes really slow. She doesn’t feel like she’s ready to drive yet. So it’s something that’s just throughout her life. It’s just something with her, but she’s really smart. She’s really bright. So she just needs more time to do some things. And that’s interesting. So, mom was okay, she understands why we’re taking so long.

Dan: Well that’s good. What do you want us to learn today from this?

Denise: I want you to learn that Equip for Reading Success or the approach for Equip for Reading Success rather is gold. It’s just gold. You can give the PAST, that assessment, which Dr. Kilpatrick has for free on his website. And you’ll very quickly know whether this is something you need to do. So that’s awesome. And also Dr. Kilpatrick talks about how this program was first implemented by the U S government, federal grants that studied all this. And so there are some word lists that are available for free. Now they’re not as complete as his book that he wrote, which, which I bought and which I use, and I love. But if you’re not ready to dive into that, on my website I will have these lists because they’re copyright free.

Dan: So that will be on the SLP proadvisor.com/free in the free resource library.

Denise: Yeah, so those lists that you can go through and it tells you what to tell the client to say, and then how to say it differently. And the lists are ranged in ten, there’s 10 words and ideally you’d want them to be able to say all 10 in a minute. That’s the speed part.

Dan: We’ll also have those available on our Teachers Pay Teachers site too, you just need to search for SLP proAdvisor.

Denise: Yeah. And those will be for free because they’re provided to me for, you know, for free, and I’m just going to retype them for you because they’re kind of like mimeograph kind of messy copies. So I’ll just pretty them up. And also I will do a Simple Tools video because parents can do this. And in fact, in the book it’s written so that an aide could implement it. He tells very clearly how to do these steps and how you take them through, because they can’t get to automatic right away.

Many of them can’t, you need to take them through. Maybe you’re giving them spelling and writing cues. Maybe you’re giving them visual cues. Maybe you’re giving them some verbal cues until they get to what he calls the automatic stage. So since I’ve been doing this, I felt that the kids could go faster if they could have some extra practice at home. So I’ve been wanting to do this video for a long time, just so I could tell the parents go here, and you can do this too.

Dan: So we’ll have a link to the Simple Tools video in our show notes, which you can get SLP proadvisor.com. We also just set up a YouTube channel so you can see all the Simple Tools videos there, if you just search for SLP, ProAdvisor on YouTube. Please click the subscribe button and ring the bell, so you’ll know when we put videos up there. And then of course, we also put those on Teachers Pay Teachers. We’re trying to be everywhere, so you can just wherever you are, we are too. So to wrap things up to date, Denise, do a little ad for the Impossible R Made Possible online course.

Denise: I’d love too. The video course itself is $49.95. That consists of eight modules. Where I break down, everything you need to know about eliciting R and getting your client on the pathway to saying R really accurately, really precisely. The workbook that goes with the course is $59.95, that’s all the worksheets I use to implement it and to send home homework. And if you bundle those two things, the workbook and the video course, you get it for $99.95.

Dan: How long is the course?

Denise: It’s two and a half hours.

Dan: Complete with videos and client videos, so you can see exactly how Denise does an actual therapy session with several clients. Those are fun.

Denise: And by the way if you complete the course you’ll get a certificate with your certification maintenance hours. So you can use that towards your re-certification if you want.

Dan: Okay. So that course is available at SLP pro-advisor dot com.

Denise: And I hope this helps you with the coming school year, you school SLPs and all the other private SLPs, too. Hope it helps you. It’s helped me a lot.

Dan: 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.

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