Self Monitoring In Speech Therapy

Self monitoring is a necessary skill that must be learned by all students.  Are you teaching your students to self monitor?

What is self monitoring?

It is the skill we use to keep track of our actions or performance.  It is used every day in our daily lives from sequencing activities of our morning routines to completing academic assignments of reading and math. To put it simply, we use it to keep track of what we do.  

Why teach self monitoring in speech therapy?

For us who are working with children correcting an error pattern of speech (or language) it is vital that we teach them how to listen to themselves so that they will become less dependent on us to tell them they have produced the sound correctly or incorrectly. 

How many times have we had children who use their "good" sounds with us but lose it once they walk out the door?  You see them on the playground, in the lunch line, or in the classroom and that good sound is gone.  Or you hear that error pattern and they see you and it immediately switches to the right pattern. Ever have that happen?  I did. It happened so often that it made me question why? The answer was simple I had not taught them how to monitor their own speech. That lead me to start looking at what I was doing in my sessions and to start creating ways for them to start using that skill early on in my treatment approach.

I kept self monitoring in mind as I created the pages in my articulation workbooks.  All the activity pages require the child to monitor himself from the very beginning.

Shown below are the first pages in the TH workbook that are for practicing the sound in words.  As you can see, I included a very simple self monitoring activity for them to perform as they practice.  The child has to listen to himself and determine the correctness of his response and mark in a way that demonstrates he said it right or wrong.  Marking is simple and takes no time. It might be to draw a smile or frown, thumbs up or down, or color grapes.  

A quick glance at the worksheet will give you your data for the session, too! There are 40 opportunities to produce the given sound in a that position of words.  This makes it easy for you to monitor their progress. 

(As homework sheets these are great to move the child's skills from the therapy room to home.)

To take a closer look at my articulation workbooks just go to my TpT store! You will find workbooks for F, V, K, G, R, S, L, Sh, Ch, and Th sounds.

Would you like to try a FREE workbook? Click here to get the complete V workbook!