Essay 2, Draft 1

When I was a seven year-old girl I had a speech impediment. Even younger, at age four; I went to speech therapy, though it was not through the school, just because I had trouble with my L’s, but that quickly went away. When I started first grade, I could not pronounce my R’s the correct way. I always end up turning my R’s sounds into W’s sounds. I would get frustrated with myself when I said them wrong and get even more frustrated when someone else mocked me for it. So, I went to speech therapy at my grade school, but I knew it as speech class. Every other day I went down 4 flights of stairs to get my speech class. Along with two other children who had similar, but different problems; having two other kids made feel good that I was not the only one. Eventually it ended up down to only me and that was upsetting. My speech class ended up to fifth grade and I was finally able to “graduate” from speech class. I was relieved, but I never thought I would end up back to speech therapy in a different kind of light. Looking back on my childhood I notice that the speech therapists used games in order to help through the session and even now they still use games.

Speech therapists tend to work in three different locations. First as we notice them is in schools, the most typical place where the children are. The next place is a hospital where both children and adults are. Finally, in the clinic of either their own or part of a branch were for all speech therapist. In any of these places the speech therapist try to keep the groups small like a group of three, but no more than that. Most likely they rather work with a one on one situation, so they can give the individual attention to the patient. They used games during sessions, but to different degrees. The first way is just having a normal board game and the children can play the game after they work on their sounds. The second way is the game was integrated into the work so there is an illusion of playing a game, but at the same time working on their sounds.

Now I believe that integrating the game into the work is the better deal. The problem with just playing a normal game at the end of the session the child wants to play the game more than to work on their sounds and if they do not do a good job they lose their chance of playing. Now with integrating the game the child can play and work at the same time and there are different kinds of games so there is variety for the children. Games should be integrated into the session because its help with phonation awareness, word analysis, and able to use different techniques.