Teletherapy: Using Board Games in Telepractice

Games. Sometimes when students are asked what they have been working on in speech, they respond with, “We play games.” With a cringe, SLP’s hope that the student and their family have a solid understanding of their speech goals. On the other side of the coin, games are motivating and productive speech and language therapy activities. I use a lot of games—all types of games with students.  But the one thing I have learned about games and therapy is that a game is only as good as the quality and quantity of student responses that it helps me to facilitate. When I use games, it is less about the game and more about how I am able to cue the student. In teletherapy, interactivity is a factor I am constantly attending to. As the SLP, I still need a level of control that allows me to respond to the student's speech and language output and how to further cue the student. For me, there is an interactivity “comfort zone”  when the child is engaged in a telepractice session.


When I worked in brick-and-mortar schools, I often relied on board games to facilitate and generate responses. I do the same thing in telepractice. In fact, figuring out how to use board games in telepractice made a significant impact on my transition to teletherapy. The company I contract with uses Go To Meeting as their platform so one of the first and most important tasks in gathering and creating activities for telepractice was to figure out how to use game boards. Some of my favorite go-to board games were created by Andee Szwabowski at The Whimsical Word. For directions on how I create game stamps to use with game boards in telepractice, see Part 1 and Part 2 How to Create Game Stamps Using Adobe Acrobat Reader.