2/14/2023

Low Prep
Therapy Marina Hennes | Speech Pathologist
marinahennessp@gmail.com

I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we are meeting. I pay my respects to their Elders,
past and present, and extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples here today.

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

Hi, I’m Marina!

I’ve been a speech pathologist for almost 10 years and have
worked within the school system and in private settings.

I am passionate about speech pathology and treating people

with speech, language and literacy difficulties. When I’m not
working with clients directly, I’m upskilling parents, clinicians
and teachers through PD.

In 2017 I created an Instagram page (@marinas.speechcorner)

so I could share low prep therapy ideas. I initially just wanted a
visual record of the activities and resources that I had
successfully used in the past.

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

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Outline
▪What does ‘low prep’ actually mean? ▪Low prep telehealth
▪How can it be useful? ▪Activity banks
▪Important things to keep in mind ▪Article banks
▪A creative mind- fake it until you make it ▪Future PD
▪Rethinking your materials ▪Questions

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

What is low prep therapy?

Planning for therapy shouldn’t take you as much time as the therapy session itself. When we talk
about ‘low prep’ therapy, we talk about resources that are:

▪Easy, simple and quick activities that don’t take hours to prepare
▪This often means less maintenance too
▪When you’re initially starting to build your resources, you might spend a little while laminating
things like flash cards etc.

▪There are great resources out there- some requiring more work than others to prepare! This PD
isn’t to discourage you from using those.
▪It can be hard to resist the Kmart toy section and the bright fun games on Instagram

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

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What are the benefits?

▪Less planning time and more session time
▪More time (for progress notes, rest, debriefing, learning)
▪Super helpful for busy SLP’s!
▪ E.g. case load numbers, location of intervention

▪ Likely to be easier to replicate at home

▪The more familiar you are with your resources, the easier it’ll be to adapt them for multiple
sessions

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

It’s not all fun and games

▪Keep in mind the evidence behind the different types of intervention that you’re implementing
▪ E.g. speech sounds: we need 100 reps
▪ Language intervention requires multiple exposures

▪ The point above is the most important and will help you decide on which resource to use.
▪For example, if you’re trying to achieve 100 articulation repetitions, you’ll need to be sure your
resource can help you reach that goal.
▪Step by Step guide:
▪ Know your goal and what the evidence says about achieving this goal
▪ Know your client – do they like crafts? cars? movement games?
▪ Think about the resources you already have

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

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Low prep therapy: articulation

Goal: achieving 100+ repetitions Goal: achieving 100+ repetitions
Client interest: drawing, flowers, love hearts Client interest: cars, racing, football

Resources: whiteboard marker, whiteboard, flashcards (or word list in mind!)

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

A creative mind can be created!

▪I’ve always been the creative type. I realised this randomly one day when I made a rose out of
confetti pieces at a wedding. Since then I’ve tried to make things out of essentially anything.

▪We are not all creatives but you can learn the tricks to being one

▪Hopefully by the end of this PD you’ll learn HOW to be a creative and use very common objects
for therapy.

▪Everything you come up with won’t necessarily fit each therapy type (e.g. fluency!)

▪There’s nothing wrong with seeking inspiration from others – this is where your activity bank
will be handy (we’ll get to that soon!)

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Rethink your materials

Use objects that are:
▪ Low cost

▪ Transportable

▪ Reusable (whether for therapy or as a

reinforcer) vs
▪ Accessible for families (super important
for carry over)

▪ Don’t require a lot of set up/pack up

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

Rethink your materials

▪Work with numbers

▪ Works best for DRILL work (e.g. articulation therapy or phonics drills)

▪ Can also work for language therapy to indicate the number of words or sentences the child
needs to produce.

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

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Rethink your materials

▪Activities with multiple pieces
▪ Practice while setting up and packing up
▪ E.g. pop up pirate, connect four
▪ Pair it up with your flash cards whether they be articulation, language, phonics

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

Rethink your materials

▪Reusables such as white boards or wipeable sleeves
▪If you don’t have a whiteboard- laminate a white piece of paper!
▪They can be used to set up your schedule or for your actual therapy.

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Rethink your materials

▪Common objects
▪There are so many things around the house or around the classroom that make fun resources

Photos or pictures in books: Create Household items (or classroom items):

Cups: hide cards under them, teach
sentences or short stories about the object function, categories, use them to
colours, hide them around the house to
scene, describe the scene, talk about how tell stories, pretend play, functional play,
teach prepositions, practice requesting by
the characters are feeling, prepositions hide them to teach prepositions, practice
trying to collect all of the colours, place
(the hat is ON his head), object function, requesting by trying to collect certain
the cup somewhere and create a sentence
narrative skills, inferencing skills, predict items, phonemic awareness (broom starts
about it, talk about function.
what might happen next or where they with…), segment the word.
are.
Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

Pictures and Videos

▪Travel pictures- we all have them on our phones!
▪Google “Animals being humans”
▪Once Upon A Picture
▪Pixar Short Films

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Movement activities
▪Pair these movement activities with flashcards or picture prompts that you are
using.

▪ Articulation: hop scotch, hide and seek, posting games, playdough smash

▪ Language: collect pictures from around the room and then create a story with
them, walk around the school/home pretending to be a photographer and
take a picture of a different ‘scene’ and create a story about it

▪ Literacy: clap/jump it out (segmenting), run to the letter/sound (draw

letters/sounds on floor with chalk or have cards on the floor)

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

My speechie starter kit

▪White board (blank and lined) ▪Dice
▪Whiteboard markers ▪Stickers
▪Playdough ▪Phone or iPad
▪Silly pictures – Kmart Coasters or make ▪Bubbles
your own
▪Cards (usually uno)
▪1 quick game (pop up pirate, connect
four or snakes and ladders)
▪Cups
+ your intervention flashcards, if you don’t have them electronically.

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Low Prep teletherapy

Before COVID hit I didn’t use any online resources for intervention. Now I look forward to telehealth sessions because
there are so many great websites! You can also use these websites if you’re seeing your client in person too of course.
TIP: Have your favourite websites bookmarked and labelled correctly for easy access.

▪ ABCYA is great for general reinforcers (lots of “Make a ….” games) – just search “make a” in the search bar.

▪ Boom Cards- lots of free ones! Takes a little coordination but you can find lots of free ones on TpT. You’ll need to have a Boomlearning
account which is free.

▪ Whiteboard and stamp feature on Zoom

▪ Youtube, google images, gopro website

▪ Kidsnews.com.au – can find news articles to cater for different reading abilities

▪ Mommy speech therapy – great for free articulation flashcards

▪ Pink cat games – You can sign up for free or buy a subscription. The free account still allows you to access 3 games on a range of
different topics.
Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

Activity and article banks

I always recommend keeping an activity and an article bank to help with easy access of
resources and information.

An example of an activity bank:

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

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Article Bank
An article bank is where you can document the reference and a summary of articles that you
need. If this doesn’t interest you, a subscription to “The Informed SLP” might.

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

Other helpful resources

There are lots of great clinicians that make a range or resources that will cut out your
preparation and planning time. Examples of these include:
▪Rebecca Reinking from Adventures in Speech Pathology (@adventuresinspeechpathology) –
Rebecca has lots of great homework sheets and tracking sheets that you could easily print,
laminate and use with multiple articulation clients.

▪Molly Gallagher from Molly SLP (@molly.slp) – Molly has pre-made literacy resources and
articulation activity games for home practice with pre-written instructions. They can also be
used by clinicians in their own therapy sessions.

▪Ashley Egger from Ashley Egger TpT (@ashleyeggertpt)- Ashley has a great “Grab and Go” pack
on her Teachers Pay Teachers account that has booklets of activities/goals that you can target
using common toys such as blocks, trains, cars, balloons and pretend food.

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Stay in touch!
I try and share all of my ideas on my Instagram page (@marinas.speechcorner) so feel free to
follow along or search previous posts for different ideas.

I also post about upcoming PD on my Instagram. Upcoming PD’s include:

▪ Goal setting and therapy planning
▪ Using arts and crafts in therapy
▪ Supporting speech and language at home and the classroom

Dates will be finalised by March ☺

▪You can also follow me on Eventbrite to be the first to know about upcoming PD.

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

Questions
If you have questions or feedback after this PD, feel free to email me! I’d love to hear from you ☺

Marina Hennes- Speech Pathologist

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