Can we play UNO?

We all know that the speech room is the place to go if you need a good game. During our "Getting to Know You" activity, nearly all of my kids said that playing games and getting candy was their favorite part of speech last year.

They are in for a rude awakening.

Now, I'll admit, I love to make therapy fun by incorporating games and other activities. There is certainly a place for this; working on speech while playing games can increase generalization. It can help with motivation as well, particularly for the kid who is being seen in private therapy for 2 hrs a week individually. These sessions can get long, and you often need something fun to break up the monotony!

In the schools, I simply have a different opinion-for now. When I am seeing 2-3 students for 20-30 minutes at a time, I often feel like I am in a race against the clock to get lots of trials/practice in. Throw a game of UNO in there and your trials per kid get cut by about A LOT. There are just too many components to deal with when you add a game in ("He looked at my cards!!!). Not to mention the guilt I feel for taking the students out of class and bringing them back after playing a game.

The biggest thing is that in this standards-based environment, I really don't know if these kind of activities have a place. I hope that I continue to develop how to handle my time in therapy in order to best serve my students academically. For now, I have been having students write sentences and short narratives with their artic cards between turns. I have also had my language students write what I would normally have them say every couple of turns to incorporate written language. Despite my efforts, I feel like these things do not go very far beyond the surface, so I wonder if it is even worth the time it takes?

Now, after saying all that, I am still up for a good game every once in awhile (especially for those artic only kids, I mean artic therapy is not usually very fun!). However, I think I will reserve games for Thursdays and Fridays and really challenge myself to be creative and create sessions full of lots of trials and practice and group discussion. But, we'll see what I'm saying in another month or two.