Gather the Materials - TOKENS

There are many household items that can be used to make activities to practice target goals for speech.  These objects can be found in your home or inexpensively at local stores.  Dollar stores are an excellent place to find materials for activities.

Great things to begin with are any kind of small object: marbles, coins, colored stones, pom poms, cereals such as Cherrios(R) or Fruit Loops(R).   These are all things that can be used as positive reinforcements.  ***Be aware of the age of your child when choosing tokens.  Be sure the items are not small enough for younger children to choke on.  To use tokens, decide on a schedule of reinforcement  (how many correct productions of a sound or other target must be produced to earn a token).  For example, you may decide that for every 5 correct productions of the sound /s/ in single words (e.g., sun, bus, Sammy), Chris will earn a plastic coin.  When he earns 10 coins, he can choose a prize (we will talk about prizes in another post). 

It's also fun to use tokens to create a larger project: paint macaroni, then string it on a piece of yarn to make a necklace.  Remember to provide as many opportunities to practice the targets as possible (e.g., say the /s/ word 3 times before painting a noodle; then the next time, say it 5 or 10 times before stringing it on the yarn).

Block Talk: earn a block and add it to the tower

Terms

target:  the specific thing on which you are working to achieve better speech or language skills.  For example, you can be targeting specific speech sounds (such as /g/ in the initial position of words) or grammatical structures (such as including the plural endings on the nouns).  

tokens: small items used to provide a tangible measure of a correct response.  Often used in conjunction with verbal reinforcement

schedule of reinforcement: how often you provide a reinforcement (e.g., after 5 trials, after 10 trials, after every one trial.