Essay Three

Speech therapists use a lot of different techniques to help their patients. One of them, for children anyways, is games. The question is do we use games just for the fun, so kids can get their mind off the work for awhile, or do we integrate games into the sessions to make the lessons more fun? Both of these techniques are beneficial, but integrating games into the session is probably the better choice. Why is it the better choice? Well for starters the work gets done and the children have more fun with it. For example, one can make a target that has the words for the child to work on and the child has a ball and throws at the target. If the child hits the word they would have to say that word five times and put it into a sentence. Now if the therapists just have a regular board game and plays it; the child would want to play and not work. There is another factor that needs to be address; there need to be a reward or negative reinforcement like if the child says the word right or wrong. Like any game if they happen to land the “bad spots” that make the player lose a turn. Well with target game or any other games the therapist can use tokens to reward and even take away those reward point if the child say the word wrong. On the other hand that might discourage the child, so playing a game just fun and then work on the words might be a better choice. The problem with that is its wasting time for the client and clinician because most of the time the therapist usually has the patient for only an hour or less, so integrating the game into the lesson is more efficient. The next problem is that there is a limited mounts of games that one can use to work into the session so the therapist ends up making the games instead. On the other hand, the therapist would have to buy the games and have the hassle what game do we play today.