Guest Post: Humor, the Secret to Early Interventions

We've had several people request to write guests posts for our blog. We promise that we only agree when we feel that it adds a meaningful contribution. I liked this particular post because I work with a lot of children on the Autism Spectrum and many of them have a difficult time with humor. So, this one goes out to my fellow educational SLPs. Enjoy.

Humor is the Secret to Successful Early Childhood Interventions

Humor is known to improve the quality of an individual’s life, it helps people manage stress, develop healthy social and communication habits, enhance creativity, and develop reading and language skills. The sound of a child’s laughter may be taken for granted as a naturally developing aspect of a child’s personality.  However, a more sophisticated assessment of the development of humor in children requires an understanding of how the development of a child’s sense of humor is directly related to the development of the child’s cognitive, social, and linguistic abilities.  When humor is viewed from this perspective, it becomes an overwhelmingly important aspect of the educational and development process. Humor may even be used as an intervention tool for children experiencing developmental challenges.

In order to use humor as an intervention tool practitioners must first understand that situations, actions or words found humorous by children often occur when there is a violation of a social, behavioral, or linguistic norm.  Therefore, a child’s ability to find something humorous relies on their ability to recognize these norms and understand actions or behaviors that would violate them.  The chart below summarizes the stages of humor development in children, and provides examples of violations of recognized norms a child might find humorous.  This data is described in the article Head, Shoulders, Knees and…Peanut Butter What Makes Young Children Laugh, by Paul E. McGhee.

Using humor in an intervention has many benefits; it is useful in generating interest in the lesson, it may help explain complex concepts, and it may help develop a strong relationship between the child and the practitioner.  In addition to these benefits, using humor in intervention techniques may serve to enhance the child’s social skills by improving the child’s confidence in their ability to tell jokes and be funny, and helping them to understand the jokes and play of their peers.

Consider the following example: If a pre-school aged student is having difficulty recognizing or naming an object such as a pencil playing a game that uses the pencil in every way except for its intended use will explain why this play is funny and help the child to recognize the pencil’s intended purpose.  To enhance language development rhyming games would help to improve the child’s memory of the pencils name and enhance the child’s understanding of the humorous nature of playing with different sounds.

Using humor to treat developmental disorders in children has many mental health and social benefits. If you’re interested in helping children through their developmental stages of life, there are many career paths that allow you to help these kids such as Speech Pathology.

The challenge of this treatment is in determining what level of development the child is at and appealing to that humor to make the therapeutic process fun and effective while enhancing social skills. Approaching the treatment of a child’s developmental disorders in a way to nurtures their humor helps develop necessary cognitive and language abilities and helps them to get along and play better with their peers.

By Stephanie Small and edited by Laura Morrison, the Content Manager of GradSchools.com. For tips and information on continuing education in Speech Language Pathology, please visit www.GradSchools.com .

New SLP iPad App: Caseload Tracker

Hey everybody, I hope your summer is going well. Probably better for the education SLPs out there.

I wanted to announce that the Caseload Tracker app has finally been published and is now up and available on iTunes.

This app is designed to help SLPs and Special Educators keep track of their caseloads and stay on top of IEPs and Eligibilities. I came up with the concept as I was getting completely bogged down by meetings with no good clear way of keeping track of all of them.

This app has a built in system for tracking these important due dates by color coding alerts in the app as well as using the iOS's push notification alerts to keep you informed of the total number of students with upcoming meetings. Its also a great resource for keeping your caseload information handy.

For those such as myself, this will be a very useful tool in staying organized with your students. Let me know what you think

And we'll be having a contest on here soon to win a code for this app. I'll stay in touch.

Student Quotes

I was cleaning my office yesterday in anticipation for having someone take over for the next two weeks. Yes, we are about to have that baby. We are scheduled to go in to the hospital in a couple of hours, but we may not have to induce with how close my wife's contractions are.

Anyway, I stumbled upon a couple of post it notes where I had written down things that I had different student say. I only have a couple, but I thought they were worth sharing.

Student: Do you know how to do the monkey bars?

Me: I use to, but I've forgotten in my old age.

Student: When I'm 60 I'll still know how to use the monkey bars.

This wasn't a "ha ha" quote some much as I thought it was insightful and nearly poetic. It came out of the mouth of a kindergartener.

The next quote came from a third grader. We were discussing how to be prepared in emergencies, and I was being silly. I asked them how prepared they were for the upcoming zombie invasion. This is what the kid said with complete seriousness.

I know I'm prepared because I can do a sweeping toe kick.

You don't need much more than that.

I'll keep you all updated on the baby front, I'll be writing tweet updates when I have internet access.

Half Way, Hang in There

It’s around half way through the school year. They come and go so quickly, it’s unbelievable. The students grow up so quickly; they are in fact a few inches taller now. You probably have had more progress reports to write, or will soon. Those are always a joy. If you are anything like me, you likely have a few straggling referrals if not more. And the IEPs… Even though you are half way through the school year, you are likely only 1/3 of the IEP meetings that you need to hold (with a third of those due just in the month of May – how do we always end up doing that???).

Even though you have so much left to do, you are half way through another year. Boy they seem be getting shorter every year, don’t they? They sure do for me. Time just keeps speeding up and it feels like my grip on the handle bars has been loosening every year. I just keep on trying to hold on for dear life.

I have not been the best blogger as of late. I don’t know if I just got burned out of writing during the month of November, or what? But I’m going to try to be better to at least check in, write something somewhat useful/interesting once a week (my late New Year resolution). We’ll see if I can stick to it. I also want to attempt to spend time improving myself as a therapist. I think I have the tendency to get bogged down so much with paper work that I don’t give myself enough time read the journals or try to learn new therapy techniques.

Sometimes I believe it’s good that the New Year begins in the middle of our school year. It gives us an opportunity to set some goals right when we need them, when we’re in the thick of things. So, I give you all permission to write some late New Year resolutions before the end of January. Maybe you want to be better at keeping on top of the paper work or you want to improve your fluency therapy skills. Whatever, just take the opportunity if you haven’t already to think of someway that you can improve as a therapist.

And hang in there, did I mention that we’re half way to summer?

Good Byes and Hellos

I recently have released a few students from speech services. Often times I have mixed feelings about this. On one side, it’s good for the student to move on, they don’t need you anymore. Yet, we tend to grow rather fond of our students. Those of us working in elementary schools, we get to watch our students grow up. I work preschool through 6^th grade. I’ve only started the preschool part last year, but I have 3 of my preschoolers in kindergarten now. They’re already a little taller and a little more mature. It’s incredible just how quickly it all happens. And every year, a new batch of our kids are getting ready to enter Jr. High School. I hope and pray that they’ll be able to make it, that they’ll do okay.

The speech language pathologist has to have a big heart to do what we do with so many that we work with. We have to be flexible to let new kids enter our heart at a moments whim; yet, we have to be understanding when our students move with little notice.

I use to have a real hard time with good-byes. I’ve never much really liked them, but there have been so many in my life, not many were permanent though, just moving on from one stage of my life to another. This school year seems to be riddle with them. My school has a high turn over rate mostly due to our status as a title one school. I always have a stack of files that are ready and waiting for a file request, and I’m constantly adding kids to my schedule. My schedule has been all over the place this year. As if it wasn’t bad enough due to the fact that we’re also a year round school. At least some of the kids come and go so quickly that I don’t get time to get attached.

There are those who manage to sneak into your heart quicker than others. One that I released recently reminds me of my daughter, same spirit, same obsession with princesses, same smile. I had to let her go, and I was happy to hear from the mom that the student was very sad to have to end speech.

Luckily, we still have several years where she can say hello in the halls.