Adults world-wide are devoting hours of their time coloring leaves, flowers, cuss words, and mandalas with colored pencils, markers, and crayons. As a speech therapist, your job is to make therapy relevant and patient specific. If your patient loves to color, bring coloring pages and colored pencils to your next therapy session. The therapeutic benefits of coloring are:

Calms the mind-repetitive movement and a focus on simple tasks calm the mind and decreases stress.

Promotes Attention-focusing on coloring a space helps decrease distractions around us, and help maintain focus on one task longer. (Think improved topic maintenance!)

Builds self-confidence-there are no wrong answers or wrong choices with coloring, and completing a space or page increases self-esteem. (Think errorless learning!)

Increased eye hand coordination-movement from your fingers sends a message to our brain, and builds up the pathways of the signal. (Think improved cognitive reorganization!)

Boosts hand, finger, and arm strength-from grip strength, to muscle endurance, coloring rebuilds strength lost from injury or illness, accidents, aging, and reduced use.

Enhances creativity-coloring uses both sides of your brain and improved those parts of the brain working together.

Expands your vision-coloring is a fun way to relearn the ability to see when parts of your vision are lost following stroke, disease, or illness. (Think visual neglect!)

My patients love targeting memory, attention, visuospatial, and even reminiscing (think dementia management!) with coloring pages.

For guidance on using coloring pages in therapy, and additional coloring page resources, look here:

For more speech therapy and coloring resources, go to https://www.TeachersPayTeachers.com/Store/Speech-Unleashed, or https://www.etsy.com/shop/SpeechUnleashed