SCIP

I am so blessed to have lots of great materials available to me. It's awesome because I have materials to meet nearly all of my students needs. However, I also have lots of stuff that isn't necessarily so great. Not to mention that I have so much that I don't know what I have! I am slowly but surely going through my materials and learning about them.

Every once in awhile I come across and true gem and my most recent gem is called Sound Contrasts in Phonology (SCIP). This is a very cool software program that allows you to enter information about individual students and then choose a contrastive approach (minimal pairs, multiple oppositions, maximal oppositions, treatment of the empty sets) to treat speech sound disorders. After choosing an approach, you then provide information about the error and target sound, press a button, and voila! You immediately get a huge list of word pairs and corresponding pictures to use to target these errors, which makes implementing these approaches sooooo much more realistic! You can then conduct therapy directly from the computer (which then will keep the data and chart it for you), or print out the word pairs and data sheets on paper. The manual also outlines 4 steps of the therapy process, from familiarizing students with the vocabulary of the target words, to practicing the targets, to moving on to generalization activities.

I am very excited about using this product with many of my students. For my caseload in particular, most of my "artic-only kids" actually demonstrate phonological processes (I think I have 1 lateralized /s/ kid, and the rest have some major processes going on), so I think SCIP will be quite useful. To begin, I have chosen 2 kids to try this out on. I actually chose 1 of my /w/ for /r/ kids just to see how it goes. He is a 5th grader and I'm hoping this new perspective will be helpful for him to make a breakthrough and get out of speech before going to Middle School! I also chose a Kindergartener who has a lot more complicated phonological needs. Although all of these approaches have decent evidentiary support, there is no evidence for which of the 4 approaches is best. So, for all of these students I have chosen to use minimal pairs, which I would say is the obvious choice for the /r/ kids. I thought about choosing another approach for my Kindergartener, and may eventually, but since I am just starting off I wanted to stick with something familiar.

I can't wait to get started with these students! It is great to have the tools to be able to more easily implement the type of therapy I have always wanted to do without having to spend hours searching for and organizing target words! Here's hoping that SCIP will turn out to be all I hope it will!