About Language Playroom
Who?
Language Playroom is created and maintained by Ezrael Maher, M.S. CCC-SLP, who has five years of experience creating and implementing speech and language therapy materials for school-aged children.
What?
Language Playroom is intended to be an online library of tools and activities for speech and language therapy activities that can be used by clinicians, families, or individuals for speech and language interventions. The site is designed to be extremely accessible, with appealing and clear visuals that should be accessible for many ages and reading levels. Although it is designed with children in mind, it can easily be used for adults with communication disorders, as well as English language learners, or as a suppliment to academic content for English/Language Arts uses.
When?
Development on Language Playroom began in early February of 2020, and the site's current functionality was complete in April 2020. The last update was January 2021, and new features are expected to release in Summer 2021.
Where?
Language Playroom is currently designed for web use, especially for teletherapy paradigms where a SLP may be sharing a screen with a client. The site does not utilize Flash player at all, only Javascript and HTML5. It has not been completely tested on mobile devices, but some of the site will be functional on mobile. If you have any suggestions or input about mobile use of the site, please go submit it on the Contact Page.
Why?
High quality educational materials should be accessible to anyone and everyone, so the site is and will always be 100% free to use, to ensure access for everyone, regardless of financial access. School-based SLPs are often given limited budgets, or may have small offices. Language Playroom takes up zero space in a classroom, and currently has articulation practice for over 3,000 vocabulary words and 60 picture books, without having to manage and shuffle flashcards or fill up a bookcase. With the COVID-19 pandemic, many school-based SLPs are scrambling to find high-quality online materials, which Language Playroom hopes to accomodate for. Finally, for families who want to ensure carryover of speech skills or have at-home practice, these materials provide more accessible specialized practice.
How?
This site has been coded in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The games featured on the site, as well as the structural framework, are edited from coding frameworks made free and public online. The Credits page can be found above and at the bottom of every page for details. Each vocabulary word image was curated by the site administrator and comes from royalty free images. The books featured on the site have been released for public domain usage, and retain the copyright information on their pages.
Updates?
The site currently has the majority of its framework in place, which means that updates should be fast and are expected to currently take place every two weeks. There are a few currently in-progress updates. The first is for the articulation section; the current total word count is around 3,000 words, but some areas like /th/ and /z/ have limited vocabularies and need expansion to be able to practice through an entire speech session. There is a current plan for activities designed to target 36 different language areas, with different levels of complexity across the four developmental categories (the left side organization of the site). Fluency is still under construction and is expected to be updated during Summer 2021.
Want More?
Language Playroom is now on TeachersPayTeachers and Boom Cards. If you are looking for digital therapy materials, the same images on this site are used in many of my Boom Cards activities, and many decks are available for free. You can find Language Playroom Boom Card decks at the link below.