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As a therapist in the speech pathology employment field, you will be responsible for helping your patients relearn skills that they have either lost or perhaps never learned. One of the best ways to help them grasp the concepts that you are trying to teach is to use reading materials to supplement your regular method of therapy.
Reading together during your therapy sessions is a great way to help your patient learn how to use the words you are teaching them in the correct context. Simply teaching them single words may be an effective way to help them sharpen their memorization skills, but it often leaves the patient unable to understand the social cues that are associated with the word or phrase.
There is no wrong age to start reading out loud with your patient – literacy is a valuable skill and can be taught at any age. While you are working in speech pathology employment, you will probably find that reading materials are more useful in certain situations – like helping autistic children. You can use flash cards and small books, as well as a variety of other reading materials to enrich almost any therapy session.
One of the most important things to remember when you are supplementing with reading materials is that you can’t allow yourself to get ahead of your patient – let them practice and learn at their own pace, don’t start doing all of the reading for them. There are two different ways to teach literacy – you can read along with your patient, or you can have them read alone while you follow along.
