What happens during a “microdose” session

You’ve been hearing me goof out about microdosed speech therapy sessions on social media (if you haven’t seen them, you can see them HERE, and make sure to follow me on IG), but I wanted to spend a little more time on the particulars of a microdosed therapy session and WHY it’s so effective.

Here’s how it works: We meet five days per week for 10-15 minutes at the same time each day. During the sessions, we have:

A Greeting Ritual

In life, it’s important to say “hello” to people. This tends to be one of the first words that kids say; children as young as 9 months of age will start to wave at people and things passing by (this is one of my FAVORITE things!).

But often, the kids who come to us at SpeechKids are not saying hi. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but the fact is: they often need some work on the “hi” part of life. So, we’re able to work on it. Sometimes we spend the whole session just saying “hi” to everyone and everything. And we have a ball doing it.

Another reason we build in this greeting ritual is that it turns out that the sounds in the word “hi” are SUPER USEFUL early developing sounds that we want kids to have. So, if we can build in a word that’s frequent, fun, useful and necessary to life (a three-fer!), we’re golden! We get a lot of practice opportunities, which means that we’re fast-tracking a skill. yay!

An Activity

This is the “meat” of any session. This is the thing we do that will elicit the target words, movements, and ideas that we want the child to work on. It might be a book, it might be playing with a toy: either way, it’s a chance to pair target sounds and words with a meaningful activity and get kiddos talking.

Something that is true in all good speech therapy for Littles, and no less true for Microdosed sessions, is that we always want to find the overlap between what the child needs to say in their day, where are they starting and how can we bridge the gap between what they need and where they are.

So we choose targets that are frequent, useful, made up of sounds that we expect a child to be able to use, and FUN! 

No one is learning if what we’re doing isn’t fun, so our primary goal is always to have buy-in from the kids. We want them to think that speech time is the MOST FUN time of the day. They know that they’ll have someone’s full attention and that the therapist will be silly and completely on their level. (Even if that means making fart noises! Sorry, parents!)

A Parting Ritual

During the last few minutes of the session, we go back to another big important skill: saying Bye!  We don’t usually walk away from people, right? We say “bye” when we leave a person or a place. Many of the kids we work with at SpeechKids need some help practicing this little ritual. So we build it into the session! Turns out, the word “bye” is another one of those perfect early words: it’s frequent, it’s useful and it’s made up of sounds that are PERRRFECT for early talkers.

RESULTS

I hope this post and video have given you a glimpse of the world of microdosed speech therapy sessions. This tiny little format has so many different layers that are built in. I sometimes think of it as a “complete food”, with everything one needs already baked in.

The progress of the kids is speaking for itself: children who have microdosed sessions are experiencing more gains, more consistent gains, and faster gains than I’ve seen before. And they’re not experiencing the ‘slide’ from a week spent between therapy sessions. 

The research is clear that frequency and dose matter a lot, particularly in early speech and language development. Kids need lots of practice opportunities in meaningful communication situations.  Microdosed sessions allow us to leverage the frequency and dose in a practical way and to really make an impact on the kids we serve.

QUESTIONS?

You know we’re always here with answers to your questions. Reach out to info@speechkids.com any time! We’d love to hear from you.