After my recent post about my discovery of the awesome SCIP program, I feel like I have been using minimal pairs with everyone I possibly can (all of my "fronters" and "r kids" especially)! So far, I am loving this approach. I think it has been much more intuitive for my students. It really makes them think about how to make different sounds and makes the consequences of using the wrong sounds much more concrete. Basically, I have a minimal pair (ex. win and rim, wed and red, wag and rag) and they take turns producing these words. Whenever they pronounce it wrong I quickly say, "You said wed I wanted you to say red. Concentrate and make a good /r/ sound this time."
Surprisingly enough, the kids who have shown the most success with this approach have been my /w/ for /r/ kids. I am not a big fan of /r/ therapy. There is a reason this is the most difficult sound to produce. /r/ therapy has never been one of my talents (not even close!), in fact I want to run screaming from /r/. But, you can't actually do this when you're the only SLP in the school. However, after deciding to make the switch to minimal pair therapy with some of these kids, I am excited to say that in just 2 short sessions, one of my 5th graders who has been in speech for a loooong time went from 50% accuracy at the word level to 90%. Woo-hoo! Not only that, but all of my students can now accurately describe the difference between producing a /w/ and an /r/.
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