Weekly Home Practice

Written by: Anna Pasternak / Treatment / December 2019

You come in for speech therapy sessions every week and your speech language pathologist assigns you exercises/homework to practice until the next session. It may seem like extra work that you may not always have time for but it is very IMPORTANT!

What is the importance of home practice?

Daily practice of the strategies you learned during the session that week will help you reinforce the skills which will eventually assist in overall generalization of the skill to everyday speech/communication. Whether you are working on your accent, voice or social skills, everyday practice of the skills learned in session are necessary to achieve progress towards your goals.  Coming in for weekly speech therapy sessions is important as it is the first step in getting your speech and language goals to where you want them to be, but everyday practice at home is equally as crucial. Think about it, you are using your speech and communication skills every single day and you want to improve your speech or language to (i.e. reduce your accent or improve your voice etc.), then you sure better be practicing how to do this daily as well. Sure, you can come in for your sessions every time but without daily practice of the skills learned in these sessions, your progress may not be as expected. You cannot just come in for sessions and think that after only a few your problem will be fixed, as this is highly unlikely without your commitment to daily home practice. Nonetheless, you will see an improvement but it will be very difficult to get where you ultimately want to be with your speech/language goals with no practice outside the clinic. 

Let’s take accent modification for example. You will be learning a lot of new motor movements with the tongue, having to shape it in a way inside your mouth that you never have before. This will take a lot of motor memory which can only be developed through consistent practice and training. Think about it, when you were younger you had to practice writing every day, and only after a few months did it become more consistent and through time and practice even more refined. The same goes for your speech, your speech is one of the most consistent and complex motor movements that you are accomplishing daily, as you are speaking throughout the day. The more you practice daily the more you are training your brain to remember the new specific motor movements that you learned. It takes a lot of hard work and perseverance to finally make the motor movement automatic and generalize it to conversation.  This also applies to when you are practicing voice exercises, stuttering techniques or social skills out in public. The more you practice the more natural and automatic your learned skills will become. 

How long /often should I practice?

Consistent practice is important to carry-over and generalize your skills outside of the clinic. A recommended time to develop new motor patterns and skills is 20 minutes a day. Practicing for this amount of time is not too long but also gives you a good amount of time for a decent practice session. Remember you are practicing daily to develop new skills, in order for these new skills to become second nature without you having to think about them all the time. The more you practice at least 20 minutes a day the easier and faster it will be to reach your goals. If you feel it is difficult to get in 20 minutes one day, try to practice for at least a bit, as something is always better than nothing. Ultimately, you should practice as much as you want to see yourself progress at a faster pace.  

I hope that this has helped you to understand the importance of every day practice and how it can push you forward to reach your goals a lot faster than you would without it. REMEMBER… PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT!

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To speak with one of the speech-language pathologists at Well Said: Toronto Speech Therapy, schedule an initial consultation by clicking the link below or calling (647) 795-5277.

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