Pokemon Go and Speech

Welcome to the land of Pokémon. Speech Pokémon!  (Yes, you read that right.) Take advantage of new trends by incorporating lessons to keep students interested and engaged. Let’s take a look at some tips on how to do this below.

What is an Speech-Language Pathologist?

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) describes Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) as those who:

work to prevent, assess, diagnose, and treat speech, language, social communication, cognitive-communication, and swallowing disorders in children and adults.

Speech-language disorders occur when a person has trouble understanding others (receptive language), or sharing thoughts, ideas, and feelings (expressive language). Language disorders may be spoken or written and may involve the form (phonology, morphology, syntax), content (semantics), and/or use (pragmatics) of language in functional and socially appropriate ways. Cognitive-communication disorders include problems organizing thoughts, paying attention, remembering, planning, and/or problem-solving.

Speech-language disorders, language disorders and cognitive-communication disorders occur across all languages. Speech therapy benefit monolinguals, bilinguals and those who know three or more languages. All providing access to a variety of speech interactions, beneficial to all.

Speech Language Pathologist who work with school-aged children are always finding new ways to keeps them engaged in the session and interested on working in their therapy goals. Frequently they will take advantage of popular games and characters in the market to include in the therapy session.  

What is Pokemon Go?

Think sequencing skills, organizational skills, and executive function skills. These three speech targets can help segue your speech therapy goals into creative and engaging speech therapy activities.

Pokémon Go uses executive function skills targeting organization and planning. More specifically, it allows speech students to work on sustained attention, task initiation and task persistence, not to mention pragmatic skills. All in all, Pokémon Go is the gift that keeps on giving regarding a speech encompassing “long-term project.”

Keep in mind that many have been talking about Pokémon for years now. The continued craze on the Pokémon Go app has kids, adults, friends, and families of all ages excited to get out and about. Pokémon continues to be a hit throughout the USA and in other countries, so why not give it a G-O! It is never too late to incorporate the world of Pokémon into one’s speech and language goals. Just be sure to check in with students ahead of time to see whether they are into Pokémon before you add these activities to their sessions. This way you have a starting point to ensure you deliver on your speech-language goals and the students’ progress.

For all the newbies click on the following link. 

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/how-to-play-pokemon-go/

Pokémon Go Themed Speech Therapy Activities

Below are a few Pokémon activities to get started.

Homemade Pokémon Balls

Make PokéBalls ahead of time for a great “mystery find” activity. You can use small or large white paper plates to start making PokéBalls. You will need black, white, and red construction paper, along with glue sticks and scissors. Once you have a PokéBall made on top of the paper plate, write a clue on the other side, or simply hide these around a designated area for kids to find. The flexibility of this activity is endless and can work on a variety of speech and language goals. Students will love using their skills to find clues to find more PokéBalls or to answer questions about them.

Looking for carryover skills? Simply send home a folder to families that include words for students to put onto their own PokéBalls. Include crayons or markers to complete this and remind them to practice explaining why they designed their PokéBalls as they did. Be sure to include instructions and translations for all multilingual families to be able to participate.

Collect the PokéBalls that were made after a week and create a bulletin board, allowing students to use their speech-language skills to explain the significance of their own creations.

Make Pokémon action cards

The popular website “AndNextComesL” has a great Pokemon activity with an option available for free printable material. There are 55 prompts that encourage kids to perform an action like a specific Pokémon. This will get everyone moving. This activity allows students the ease of adding their own action cards to focus on their own speech and language goals. For instance, to target an articulation goal their Pokémon may require them to hop around and say three words that start with a specific target sound.

Send home a PokéStop

Within the Pokémon Go game, you must head to a PokéStop to get more PokéBalls to use when capturing critters. This is a great way to incorporate carryover at home.  As aforementioned, be sure to include instructions and translations for all multilingual families to be able to participate.

Need more Pokémon Go speech therapy activities? Plan, discuss or have your students execute any of the following Pokémon Go speech therapy activities.

• Plan, organize and create a Pokémon trainer
• Have students bring in and discuss their Pokémon action cards
• Practice the avatars names. Think articulation and muti-syllabic words.
• Discuss Pokémon avatars strengths and weaknesses.
• Incorporate the evolution of a Pokémon
• Design holiday/event Pokémon and have your students explain why they chose their design
• Have your students discuss “What would you keep in your Trainer Backpack?”

If your students are not interested in Pokemon, then you can find what cartoon or game calls their attention to include it in your session. Soon you will find out you have become an expert on popular children cartoons and games. For your future therapy session remember to keep the focus on the goals and have fun.

Looking for your next SLP job opportunity? The Bilingual Therapies team is here to help. Search through our available SLP jobs today.