by Aundria Range
The School of Public Health Initiative’s Department of Communicative Disorders hosted its annual Fall Festival at the Central Mississippi Speech, Language and Hearing Clinic on Ridgewood Road.
This year’s Fall Festival had a storybook theme. Each therapy room was decorated like a scene from a classic children’s storybook, including, The Cat in the Hat, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Snow White, 101 Dalmatians and There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat.
Eighteen first-year graduate student clinicians participated, along with the department’s clinical supervisors. Clinicians dressed as various storybook characters welcomed their young clients into each room to participate in fun therapy-related activities. These activities included several speeches and therapy tasks in the contexts of games, fun activities and storybook readings.
The therapy focused on improving socialization skills, turn-taking, vocabulary, word recognition, word-finding, word association, visual sequencing, auditory comprehension, verbal sequencing and reading comprehension.
Once the therapy was complete, the clients received a treat and moved along to the next room. The Fall Festival was a successful event filled with speech, language and literacy activities as well as fun.