Randomized Home Practice Sheets

This packet includes a variety of home practice options to facilitate generalization. Research from the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA National Outcomes Measurement System, 2005) revealed that children who practice at home benefit greatly. They found that children who complete homework improved significantly more than children who did not complete homework. Therefore, speech-language pathologists should provide home practice that aligns with best practices.

Treatment in San Diego Unified School District follows the principles of motor learning theory (phonetic) and the complexity approach (phonemic). Motor learning theory suggests that randomized practice leads to retention of new skills. Therefore, each homework sheet requires students to self-monitor during randomized practice. There are also a variety of activities so that students become flexible in sound practice and engage in metacognitive activities. Activities include crossword puzzles, word scrambles, secret codes, conversational practice, and other tasks to entertain students with varying interests.

These worksheets put into practice the principles of complexity theory. All activities include high-frequency/low-density words (Morrisette & Gierut, 2002 and Storkel & Morrisette, 2002) to maximize generalization. Furthermore, each task incorporates randomization of some kind as stipulated by motor learning theory. Some tasks require students to practice at different levels, others different numbers of practice items or varying actions, emotions or other parameters.

A great deal of time and effort went into creating these downloadable documents, and your financial support helps to defray the cost of maintaining this website. We would greatly appreciate it if each individual SLP purchases his or her own copy. SLPath.com is currently offering this e-book of over 150 pages of exercises (including solutions) for only $12.00. After you order, the PDF document will be emailed to you within twenty-four hours (usually much sooner). Thank you for your support and for making a positive difference in the lives of children.

Click here to download a sample of the Home Practice Sheets.

Randomized Activity Cards

This document includes cards for you to print out to randomize activities for your students.

According to motor learning theory, there are three phases of acquisition: 1. pre-practice/placement (when the child learns how to produce the sound in isolation and syllables until 80% accuracy), 2. practice (when the child practices at different levels of difficulty - sounds, syllables, words, phrases, sentences and conversation - in varied activities), and 3. generalization (Skelton, 2004). Randomized practice has been shown to facilitate retention and generalization of sounds (Skelton, 2005). Furthermore, this approach advocates that practice should consist of connected, meaningful speech because that is how we actually communicate. Hoffman and Norris (2005) suggested that intervention that is independent of communication (i.e. drill only) often results in the child defaulting to the old motor pattern of speech during actual communication. This would, of course, inhibit generalization and extend treatment time.

Students appreciate randomized activities because they are fun and keep them on their toes. One way to randomize is for students to practice at different levels (sounds, syllables, words, phrases, sentences and conversation) within the same session. Others include different numbers of practicing targets or practicing words in different orders. These cards will allow you to randomize treatment in other ways that lets kids be kids.

These exercises will allow you to vary actions, animals, emotional contexts, and different ways of talking. My students brainstormed many of these options. During these activities, students will need to self-monitor while doing something else, which correlates with real communication and results in greater generalization. Students who self-monitor during activities in the speech/language room are more likely to generalize to all communicative contexts (Koegel, Koegel, Van Voy & Ingham, 1988).

A great deal of time and effort went into creating these downloadable documents, and your financial support helps to defray the cost of maintaining this website. We would greatly appreciate it if each individual SLP purchases his or her own copy. SLPath.com is currently offering this e-book with 88 activity cards for only $12.00. After you order, the PDF document will be emailed to you within twenty-four hours (usually much sooner). Thank you for your support and for making a positive difference in the lives of children.

Click here to download a sample of the Activity Cards.

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Order both the Randomized Home Practice Sheets and the Cards for Randomized Activities together for only $20.00 (a savings of $4.00).

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