Town Maps allow your student to target single or multiple in the initial, medial, and final position of words in a FUN, NEW way! Any SLP knows that articulation can get, well... boring; not only for the student(s), but for the clinician, too. And if the clinician is bored, you can count on the students dreading speech. Articulation Town Maps can be used in individual sessions or in group sessions.
The clinician (or student) picks a starting location on the map, as well as an end point, then instructs the student to give verbal directions from Point A to Point B. For example, "Start at the Grocery Store and tell me how to get to Grasshopper Pond". To really switch things up, the clinician might throw in some curveballs such as, "I want you to go to Chase bank for me, then pick up a pie at Pizza Palace. After getting gas, meet us at the circus" (This is great for targeting sequencing and auditory memory for everyday tasks). The creativity is endless. You can say, "Tell me how to get from Sandy Slopes to the stables, but Sullivan Street is closed for construction" (Great for targeting problems solving in real-world scenarios). The creativity is endless.
Better yet, Articulation Town Maps allow you to target sounds in "structured conversation"- that awkward step in between mastering a sound at the sentence level and mastering it at the level of reading aloud or unstructured, spontaneous conversational speech. This is a product unlike any I have come across before. I couldn't find what I was looking for, so I made it. There are three maps: one is meant to target initial /s/ & /z/, one is meant to target medial /s/ & /z/, and one is meant to target final /s/ & /z/. (While each word position (initial, medial, final) has a separate map allowing you to target various word positions individually, I will be coming out with a fourth map that combines /s/ and /z/ across all word positions. It just so happens that there is a lot of crossover between /s/ & /z/ on the various town maps.)
One of the many great things about Articulation Town Maps is that you can incorporate personal landmarks, street names, etc. to make the activity more exciting and personalized. For example, I made this set of maps for a student named Everett, hence "Everett St." and "Pizza Palace". Town maps with more “fill in the blanks” and new graphics/locations will be uploaded intermittently to avoid overlearning and keep speech fun!