The Parking Lot Method, Demonstrated With Toys

Full transcript

Hi, it's Nicole coming in from the NYU Motor Speech Lab. I get a lot of questions about how I keep the kids engaged in the pretty intense motor speech therapy we're doing here in the lab. So today I want to talk to you about something I affectionately refer to as the parking lot method. Mr. Ape is going to be my pseudo child today, because of patient confidentiality.

The first thing I would do is show the child: "Okay, we're going to be playing with the Paw Patrol cars, and the first car we're going to work for is Chase." Or I would have them pick. "Isn't that exciting?" And we would go into a block.

So I would say, "Okay, Mr. Ape, first we're going to work on our word, and the word is 'high.'" We might do a block of "high." Then I would say, "Look at that, you earned Chase." I would give Mr. Ape Chase, and give him a moment to look at it and be happy and proud about it. Then I would say, "Okay, we're going to put him in the parking lot so we can play with him later," and I'd park him.

Then I would get another one. Maybe we're working for Rubble, and maybe the word now is "happy." I'd say, "Okay, Mr. Ape, now we're going to work on 'happy.'" We'd go through a block of "happy," I would give him Rubble, he would hang out with Rubble for a second, and then we would park Rubble in the parking lot.

The idea is to work for all of the cars, park them all in the parking lot, and get all of those beautiful productions, repetitions, and practice. If we earned all of them, we would have a little more time for a more meaningful break. Maybe I would bust out some tracks and give the child a bit more of a break before we went back into practice.

I have other parking lot ideas for you today. You're probably all familiar with animal bowling. You could earn each animal, put them in the parking lot, and then set up to go bowling. Another one is Play-Doh. Here we earned the different colors of Play-Doh. Each time they earned one, I had them play with it a little bit, then we parked it, and then we made Play-Doh food.

And remember, this can be done with anything: markers, crayons, blocks, magnet tiles. You want to be maximizing repetition while still keeping the child interested and happy, and making it fun.

I hope that's helpful.