Ming at Agents of Speech shows parents how to set up DIY speech therapy at home with 5-10 minutes of daily practice. You need proper seating where the child's feet touch the ground, simple toys like bubbles and snacks, and a transparent jar to encourage communication.
Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com in this short video series, I want to talk about how you can actually start doing home therapy today by yourself. Right now you cannot go to a speech therapy center. I've been getting more and more inquiries about online therapy, especially for speech. So I wanted to make this video to clear up the basics about how you can start. Alright, for this first video we're going to talk about hardware, what you need at home to start today. So when you think about speech therapy at home, you always want to start around five to ten minutes every day. And my philosophy to teaching parents is to teach two things. Number one is structured table tasks and number two is what we call naturalistic language facilitation. I'll talk about these definitions in the next two videos coming. And first of all, I wanna talk about sitting down. I'm a big fan of sitting down and playing with a child. And if your child is below three years, he or she is around to something, then I would recommend you getting a play mat for your child so that they can sit on the floor. If they are 3 or above, get a kid's table and kids chair. Get the cheapest one on Amazon or whatever online store you can buy from. An alternative to a kid's chair and table, you can get a high chair with a normal height table so that you can save yourself from some back pain. All right. And if your child cannot put their legs on the floor, which is very important, children tend to get pretty tired if their hands get are hanging from the chair. So what I do is I put a yoga blocks as a footstool so that your child can actually step on it. Okay. You can use anything you want, as long a shoebox or whatever just so that they're actually putting the feet on the ground. Now that your child is sitting nicely in those five to 10 minutes, you want to have stuff to engage with your child. The things that I love to recommend in the beginning are bubbles and snacks. Frankly speaking, teaching your child with toys through play and whatever is a difficult task. That's why I like to teach parents to use snacks and bubbles in the beginning. And that's because I've been there before. As a junior therapist, I didn't know how to play with children and I nearly lost my job during the probation period until something clicked inside me and I knew how to interact with children. All right, so if you are right now not child friendly even to your own son or daughter, that's fine. You'll learn it somewhere down along the line. And you only want to do it five to ten minutes a day. A lot of parents report back to me saying, hey, Ming, it's not working anymore. The stacks aren't fun. The bubbles aren't fun. Well, the thing is, you must have used it for too long a day. If you kept it to five to 10 minutes, it's still fresh. It's still fun. Don't overuse it. It's something that we will change. We will go away from bubbles and snacks into toys later on. And another thing we love to recommend is a transparent jar, something like this. Don't mind the powder inside, but it's something that's big enough so that your child's little hands will be able to open it. You use something like this to introduce some difficulty where they must communicate with you in order to get what they want. So something transparent. You can see what exactly, what's inside. You can put the snacks inside, you can put toys inside. And in the beginning, it's a really good idea to do so. So this is the first part of our series. If you need the full checklist, you can go to ww.agentsofspeech.com checklist for the full list of things I recommend to my clients when they start at home. And this video series is to introduce home therapy to parents who are thinking about doing it right now, given the current situation. And if you're watching this at a later date, if this is still applicable. This is all the stuff that I recommend to parents even before the pandemic. Right. So I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Please drop comments like this video, share it to your friends, and I'll see you in the next video soon. Bye.
