The CITRA app has been a wonderful and useful new tool in my “TOOL BOX” of materials and strategies for therapy sessions. I pull out the iPad and have the CITRA app up and running at the beginning of my individual speech therapy sessions. The clients I use this app with range in age from two and half years old up to seven years old with a range of diagnoses of speech delay, speech disorder, expressive and receptive language delay, Apraxia, and Autism. My clients use the app initially to make a choice of an activity for the session. In my Template Folder I have premade communication boards of my clients favorite activities, which includes balloons, bubbles, Pop up Pirate, Bowling, Go Away Monster, farm, play-dough, Mr. Potato Head, water play, car, and windup toys just to name a few. After my clients have made a choice of an activity we use the CITRA app to target multiple speech therapy goals:

1. Requesting objects and actions, for example “I want bubbles.”, “cut dough”, “roll dough”, “red car”,

2. Expanding utterances using actions and modifiers, for example “pop big bubble”, “open red door”,

3. Demonstrating understanding of new vocabulary and concepts. Find the scissors. Show me big. Point to red.

4. Articulation goals. I have made communication boards to target specific speech sounds as an activity during the session. With one client we made a /s/ blends page. The client thought of /s/ blend words and selected the images he wanted to target, such as “spider”, “spider man”, “ spiders”, “spider web”, “snail”, “spooky”.

The options of images and vocabulary to target are endless. Bring out your creative side and use the CITRA app to target your goals in a new and exciting way.

Author: Leslie Terrell, M.S. CCC-SLP, is a pediatric speech language pathologist. She has been providing group and individual speech therapy to toddlers, preschoolers, and school aged children at the Columbus Speech & Hearing Center since 2006. She enjoys working with families and helping provide them with the skills and knowledge to help their child gain the skills to communicate his or her basic wants and needs. What’s better than providing a child with a “voice”?

She received a Bachelor’s degree in Science in Hearing and Speech Sciences at Ohio University and received a Masters of Science in Speech Pathology at Loyola College in Maryland.