Drill play is a staple in speech therapy because (generally) the more you practice, the greater the improvement you’ll see! By incorporating aspects of play like fun activities and brightly coloured game tokens and charts, drill play helps to keep little ones engaged and excited about reaching their speech therapy targets in sessions.
In today’s article we’re going to look at how to use drill play in speech therapy as well as some of the best speech therapy resources for making drill play fun.
Keep reading to find out more!
How to Use Drill Play in Speech Therapy
Why We Love Drill Play in Speech Therapy
Drill play is widely known as a popular and effective therapy approach for children with articulation / motor speech therapy goals. This approach is based on the idea that, in a session, you’ll ‘drill’ the correct production of a sound, word, or phrase multiple times. This frequent practice of the correct production aligns with the principles of motor learning (remember learning about those at uni?) and will support your client to see progress towards their therapy goals.
Is Play-Based Therapy Better Than Drill Therapy?
If you’ve done a quick Google search on drill play you may have noticed that there are a lot of articles out there saying that play-based therapy is better than drill in some cases. In our experience, is totally depends on the child and what you are working on together in therapy! For example, you may have a little one that shuts down or gets emotionally dysregulated when corrected. This type of client may not be suitable for a drill therapy approach.
However, if you are working on articulation or motor speech, aiming for best productions using drill play is highly effective and shouldn’t be discounted so quickly!
Shriberg and Kwiatkowski found that for achieved speech-based therapy goals, drill was more effective and efficient than play. *It’s important to note that while play led to an improvement too, it just happened after more time had passed in therapy.
One of the biggest arguments for using play-based therapy over drill-based therapy is that it can be boring or overwhelming for the child. But the good news is that drill play can be a whole lot of fun too – it doesn’t need to feel repetitive or boring! By incorporating games into your drill therapy, and fun visual trackers for your clients to see their progress, you can make drill play an enjoyable experience for all.
Best Games for Drill Play in Speech Therapy
Card Games
Card games like Uno or Snap can be a great reinforcer in drill play speech therapy sessions. It’s really simple to introduce and explain too! Every time the child uses the correct production of their target, they receive a card. Once all the cards from the deck have been given out (or half if you have a big card deck) you can take a break from drill and play the reinforcement game.
Bonus points if you keep a tally for the winner of each card game!
Cause and Effect Games
Cause and Effect games are a staple in every speech therapy resource cupboard. Pick out your favourite one (We’re looking at you Pop the Pig!) and take the tokens (I.e. burgers in this case) out of the box. Give the child one token for every 2, 3, or 5 best productions of the target and when all the tokens are given, play the game together.
With Pop the Pig you can also choose to do the number of best productions based on the number on the bottom of the burger. For other cause and effect games you could also choose the number of productions based on a dice roll if you’d prefer. Whatever works best for you!
Throwing Games
If you have a client that likes to get up and moving, throwing games might be a more enjoyable reinforcement activity to go with their drill work. You can use soft throwing sacks or balls or for something more table-top friendly, jumping frogs or spiders can work too. For this one we’d recommend keeping a hold of the ‘throwing items’ until all have been collected to avoid the temptation to start throwing before the drill work has been completed.
Board Games
Board games can also work well as a reinforcement activity in a drill play speech therapy session. For this one, you can use the dice roll number to choose the number of repetitions the child needs to complete of the target word before beginning their turn. This is a great way to keep a child engaged in drill play throughout a session, rather than having to wait to play the reinforcement game at the end of drill.
We hope you’ve found our deep dive into drill therapy helpful! For more insights into speech therapy resources and speechie career tips, head on over to the SpeechEase blog.
Pssst -> We are NOW HIRING Speech Pathologists in Mackay and Townsville. Discover our Regional Relocation program and find out how you can enjoy the tropical lifestyle while supporting clients across the lifespan.
For more information:
https://www.pandaspeechtherapy.com/post/2017/11/19/drilling-can-be-fun-freebies
https://speechymusings.com/2018/02/05/best-speech-therapy-games-for-drill-by-age/
https://www.proquest.com/openview/c097731e193ae960e5fa422474a7401a/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7186560/