NEWSLETTER #8: AFTER THE ASHA CONVENTION

Hello!

Wishing you all a wonderful holiday season and hope that your 2014 will be terrific!

ASHA in Chicago was an amazing event with 15,000 professionals attending. My session with my colleague Peter Flipsen Jr. went very well with 300+ people attending. One of the attendees Kim Lewis has a blog called Activity Tailor and she wrote a review of the presentation and the SATPAC Program. If you want to read the whole review, scroll down to Dec. 17, 2013 on her blog. I took some of what she wrote to share with you here:

SATPAC (Systematic Articulation Training Program Accessing Computers)

I arrived at ASHA with my schedule more or less organized. There were a few sessions that conflicted with one another and I was going to need to make a final selection, but a few I was going to be at no matter what. The one at the top of the list was Efficacy of the SATPAC Approach for Remediating Persistent /s/ Errors. It was as game changing as I could have hoped.

SATPAC is designed to move kids through therapy quicker (while homework is a must, contact time with the therapist is kept to a minimum, often 10-15 min/week) and assist carry-over since you are immediately working with normal rate and prosody and you move to sentence level work so quickly.

The focus is on nonsense words, a recommendation that came up in several sessions, since they don’t have previously learned error patterns associated with them. It also focuses on very high trials/session-200-500 depending on the length of session time (and, yes, 200 for a 10-15 min session is possible!).

The presenter and creator, Stephen Sacks, had an hour to take us through the program and his explanations and video made compelling arguments for the protocol.

The practice phase is the most exciting. SATPAC allows you to enter the child’s name and generate lists specific to that child. So, for our example, I’ve entered myself as a student with a list, also struggling with both “th” sounds as well as “r.” I enter that in and have SATPAC make 5 practice lists specific to my abilities.

Lists 1-4 are single nonsense words with various consonant and vowel changes. List 5 contains sentences with one nonsense target word. The clinician asks questions (given to you) and the student answers with the same sentence each time, but varying the stress.

Next you move on to the generalization/transfer phase which again gives you the opportunity to print out tailored lists for students at the phrase, short sentence and sentence level.

I’ve been using the program now for a few weeks and I’m noticing much faster improvement than I frequently see. I’ll admit it’s taken me longer to get the hang of it than I expected. I sometimes feel like I’m flipping back and forth between my notes and the lists (or “winging” the pronunciation of the nonsense words) but I’m improving every day and the effort is WELL worth it! I would suggest immediately starting with the free CEU section of his website to be sure you have a good handle on both the idea behind the program and the implementation of it.

For me, the program has the most utility with elementary aged students and ideally with decent language skills.

I’ve sent home a couple lists and while I haven’t had a parent call to say “what?!” I have had to do a bit more education (why we are using “fake” words) and cheerleading (“You can do it! Don’t sweat whether or not you have the vowels quite right!”). The additional practice might not be the best fit for all families, but you could easily have a teacher, aide or carefully selected buddy run through the lists since they are so quick to do.

The program also contains list generating abilities for kiddos with apraxia that move through a hierarchy allowing reduplication, reduplication of just the consonant (varied vowel), reduplication of vowel (varied consonants) or varying both consonant and vowel. Again, you have the option to remove and sound-vowel OR consonant-that the child doesn’t yet have in their repertoire. I haven’t had the need for this yet, but it’s something that has come up for me in the past and I’m looking forward to adding this to my arsenal when it crops up again!

Stephen Sacks SATPAC Speech

To see details about /r/ and /s/ remediation and more information about my approach, I offer free ASHA CEUs on my website www.satpac.com or you are welcome to just watch the presentation.

Workshops- To get information about Pam Marshalla’s workshops in February in Southern California, here is the link. If you would like me to come and speak to your organization or school district, contact me at steve@satpac.comsteve@satpac.com . For the BER seminars, here is a link to one of my workshops. Dates are Jan. 7 in Cherry Hills, NJ, Jan. 8 in White Plains, NY, Jan 9 in Chicago and Jan. 10 in Champaign.