SuperMario Fluency Program: Using Video Games to Gain Interest

Recently, I have had a huge flood of little boys with moderate fluency issues.  I found that not only did they have fluency issues in common.  They also were CRAZY about video games.  This got me thinking:  how could I use their love of video games to engage them in fluency therapy.  The result was my SuperMario Fluency Program.  Essentially, I took some of the crazy characters from the multitude of Mario games (with the help of my sister, Lori Davis and graduate student, Jamie Oxley who knew they characters and properties better then I!) and matched them with the strategy I wanted the students remember and, maybe, even use!

The result was a  program that they found fun!  They even got to help with its creation and evolution, since they knew Mario way better than I!  They keep insisting that they want to earn a flag at the end of the year.  I really have no idea what this means, but I will post the picture of the final creation!  This program was definitely intended to be used for younger students who are working on increasing their awareness of their disfluencies, but it also introduces some of the concepts of stuttering modification, including cancellations and pullouts in a concrete way they can understand.

We started with some simple awareness activities.  We used these visuals to talk about our "bumpy speech" and the lightening was a visual reminder to slow down.

Moving to stuttering modification, we found some images to reflect cancellations and pullout.  I love the idea of the banana peel being a pullout!

Finally, the boys try to earn gold coins by "catching" their disfluency.

Feel free to grab download the complete program!  I hope it works as well for you as it has for me!
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B8QDAPKSrgPOUzRxTHVoLUxiSGM