Increasing Parent Involvement
September 15, 2008
One of our summer workshops for The State of Texas was on ways to increase the participation of our parents in our therapy. Two of the most important ways that came up during discussion at the workshop were:
- Including therapy activities in daily routines (e.g. meals, bath time, driving in the car, etc.) so that parents don’t feel overwhelmed with very busy schedules; providing therapy strategies in writing to decrease any confusion with what to do at home (e.g. using the SMILE book for the ECI population provides a comprehensive, easy to understand book full of activities for parents to use at home).
- Explaining to parents the purpose of the therapy activities so that they understand that when we are “playing” with their child, we’re also working on cognitive and linguistic skills. Helping parents understand the importance of their involvement in their child’s therapy.
We will be presenting to the Austin Area Association of SLPs on Increasing Parent Involvment on Thursday, November 13th. It will be at Seton Hospital on 38th, McFaddin Auditorium, 6 P.M.
Success from the field with SMILE
March 8, 2008
One of the hardest cases in early childhood intervention therapy is when you come in as the third or fourth provider to be involved in the case. The child hasn’t been seen in 4 months and the parents are frustrated because there has been no progress. The SMILE program has helped us to overcome these challenges. It is particularly rewarding to have the director of the ECI facility request that you stay on the case and see it through until the child complete the program.
Scott Prath, M.A., CCC-SLP - Bilinguistics
Scott talks about his success in field with SMILE:
Developing SMILE
March 4, 2008
The SMILE program, as with all of our materials, was initially developed out of a need for tools that didn’t exist. As an independent agency, we are fortunate in that we are not confined by the bureaucracy that tends to slow needed change in our field. Rather, the only thing that drives us is the parent’s outcome and our efficiency. This freedom gives us a unique ability in our field to dramatically increase the speed at which we can produce really good therapy methods and materials. In the development of SMILE, we were able to bring our team together and draw from our combined knowledge and experience in different environments without being confined by any existing process.
Scott Prath, M.A., CCC-SLP - Bilinguistics
Scott discusses developing SMILE:
The result with SMILE was not only a program that was effective, but something that made us more efficient as therapists. With most therapy, you can tell over a period of time when a program is effective, but in this case we have gained immediate traction and the escalation has been extremely rapid. Our experience with it in our own field testing has been absolutely solid and the feedback from our counterparts and other service professionals has been unanimously positive.
SMILE Program for Early Childhood Intervention
February 29, 2008
One of the biggest challenges we encounter with the model of home-based therapy in Early Childhood Intervention programs has been a lack of follow through. Once a therapy session ends, we as therapists are relying on the parents to become the service provider. The problem has been a lack of structured materials and programs to guide the parents. They have had little information and nothing tangible to help them along in the process. We knew we needed to embed activities with specific goals into the routine of the families and give them a simple, concrete road map to be successfully involved in development process.
After months of development and work in the field, we are excited to announce the release of our SMILE program, a bilingual, home-based intervention plan for the speech-language pathologist and early childhood interventionist. SMILE is an acronym for Sign, Model, Imitate, Label, and Expand, five strategies we encourage families to use on a regular basis to increase their children’s communication skills.
Ellen Stubbe Kester, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
President - Bilinguistics
Ellen discusses what SMILE is:
We developed SMILE with the goal of enabling parents to be more engaged in the developmental process and we are extremely excited about the results we are having. The tools are really encouraging the families to use the program and stay involved. The parents immediately have an understanding of their role and a picture of where we are going, and the results we are shooting for in the end. The program is available at our home page bilinguistics.com