Speech Therapy Treatment Technique: Offering Choices

Speech Therapy Treatment Technique:

Offering Choices

By Rebecca Turner, CCC, SLP

 

Offering choices is a wonderful therapy technique to elicit language.  It can be used with kiddos who are non-verbal where you are targeting pointing to or looking at a specific object, all the way to those kiddos who working on expanding their sentence length to multiple words.  This technique helps to increase communication, but it also gives the child a little bit of control over their environment.  

There are hundreds of opportunities throughout the day to offer choices, it does not have to be solely play based!  If you do choose to utilize toys, some of my favorite ones to use when targeting this skill are puzzles, trains, and Mr. Potato Head, but you can do this with anything that has more than one option. 

1.     You need a way to hold the pieces, either a bag, container or simply putting the pieces in your lap.  This is VERY important because if the child can independently access the toys, it gives them NO reason to communicate. 

2.     You want to make sure child is in front of you so that you can have good eye contact and engagement. You want to get them excited about the toy and this can be done with your facial expressions, voice and possibly demonstrating the toy, especially if it is not a toy the child is familiar with.  You also want to decrease the distractions in the environment, like turning off the tv, putting away other toys, etc so that they can focus on the language being presented.

3.     Once you have set up the interaction, you are going to take 2 of the items.  Using your “Tell me face”, which is eyebrows raised so they know you want them to respond, label the items and move them toward the child.  You want to make sure that you provide that verbal model in clear, simple language.  For example, Do you want “car or train”, “car or train”.

4.     Repeat the options if they do not respond.  The type of response you are targeting varies depending on the level of the child. 

5.     If they grab both items, don’t give them the objects, we want them to make a choice of 1 item, so model the choices again.  Then if they are still grabbing both, model and give one of the items to them.

Making choices is the foundation for establishing the importance of the need to communicate with your child, even if they are just pointing to an object and unable to verbalize!