What if I told you there was a way for your clients to make faster progress with less time in therapy?  I’m guessing you’d be all about it, right?  Well, the 5-minute model has shown itself again and again to be exactly the solution we need.  By seeing children 2-5 times per week for only five minutes each, we see faster gains on articulation, phonology, and other drill-and-practice skills.  Read on to find out how this works!

Instead of seeing your clients in a group for 30 minutes, you see each child individually for 5 minutes.  I like to pull the students right outside their classroom and do it in the hallway so we reduce the travel time (and I can get more clients seen in less time).  I set a timer for 5 minutes and we drill, drill drill.  No games, no fluff, nothing to prep.  Just me, the child, and our artic cards.  Once the timer goes off, I send them back to class.  Then, repeat!  5-minute speech therapy sessions are usually conducted 2-5 times per week.

Make Faster Progress in Less Time

Yes!  This model has been studied multiple times with amazing results.  Studies show that children learn faster with distributed practice vs. mass practice and results of a meta analysis showed that high intensity interventions (2-3 sessions per week of 70+ trials) were most effective for children with speech sound disorders.

The 5-Minute Kids program conducted a study which showed that children receiving nine 5-minute sessions were dismissed in about half the time of children receiving seven 30-minute sessions per month.

Learning a new skill is all about repetition.  The more times a child practices the new skill, the faster he/she will learn it.  But can we can get the same number of trials/repetitions (or more) in a 5-minute individual session as we can in a 30-minute group session?  Check out this recording of a 5-minute /r/ session that I did while I counted my reps:

The nice thing about 5-minute sessions is that it’s not a long session so most of the time, you can keep a child working for that amount of time.  But sometimes, they start to get squirrely or start to have trouble focusing by the end.  Here are a few tips for helping with that:

I know the hallway isn’t the quietest place around.  Here are some tips for doing 5-minute sessions in a noisy, busy school.

Need some more help getting started with 5-minute sessions?  Check out our full course here:

Make Faster Progress in Less Time

Hi, I’m Carrie! I’m a speech-language pathologist from Columbia, Missouri, USA. I’ve worked with children and teenagers of all ages in schools, preschools, and even my own private practice. I love digging through the research on speech and language topics and breaking it down into step-by-step plans for my followers.

Fun Fact: I didn’t realize that I had ADHD until I was an adult.  It all clicked when I read that people with ADHD are motivated by things that are challenging, novel, or highly interesting.  If a task doesn’t fall into one of those three categories, we have a hard time getting it done.  I’ve subconsciously accommodated for this my whole life by setting challenges for myself or doing mundane tasks in novel ways, like doing my homework in a (dry) bathtub instead of at the kitchen table.  Understanding how our brains work can be incredibly empowering and I love helping children understand these things as well!

Connect with Me:

The post 5-Minute Speech Therapy Sessions: How Long Should Therapy Sessions Be? appeared first on Speech And Language Kids.