Clients Enter Kelly Glynn’s World of Wonder

02/21/2014 

Kelly Glynn ’10 calls herself a “speech craftologist.”

Her clients experience her creativity first-hand when they work on their communication skills by exploring an imagination-inspired seascape, forested vista or outer space galaxy; or as they play a game or cradle a hand-made toy.

“It’s all about engaging them in a creative way,” explained Glynn, who currently displays her special talent as a speech-language pathologist for clients of all ages at South Shore Speech, Language & Swallowing Disorders, PLLC, in Babylon, N.Y. “My creativity also gives me a chance to think outside of the box.”

Glynn’s ideas for effective therapy were shared in “Glimpses,” a feature in January’s The ASHA Leader. The publication is the national newsmagazine of the American Speech-Hearing-Language Association, written for those in the field of speech-language pathology and audiology.

Her article is illustrated with a photo of a young clients’ therapy session exploring one of her more original therapy room settings: outer space.

“My goal is to transform an everyday treatment session into an extraordinary moment that takes my clients away from their perceived reality in my speech room and, in the case of this photo, into the amazing world of outer space,” she writes in the blog. “As we count down and shout, ‘Blast off!’ the lights go off, my room transforms into outer space, I give the child a flashlight, and articulation treatment is in full swing. I place pictures of objects around the room prior to the child’s arrival, and my little astronaut finds each of them with the flashlight. Once the child finds the picture, we label it and practice the targeted sound.”

Glynn has assisted young clients in making paper snowflakes, which featured their target words, instead of drilling the child with picture cards for the duration of the session.

“I can’t believe what you can do with a crayon and a scissors,” said Glynn.  “I am an avid scrap booker, quilter, and crafter in my spare time, which are all skills I learned from my grandmother who was a doll-maker when I was a child. My father is a mechanic and is always reinventing the wheel as well. We are all about do-it-yourself projects”

“If they don’t sell something my client is interested in, I’m going to make it,” she said. “If they don’t have a game for the communication skill I am targeting, I’m going to put it together myself.”

“It’s just so great to finally bridge the gap between my passion and my work; my hobby and my life,” she said.

Having a clientele base which ranges in age from birth to geriatric, there’s nothing she can’t use or won’t do to make a therapy session memorable for them.

With one youngster, for example, Glynn decorated a small trashcan with a push-in top that she turned into the ridiculously large mouth of the nursery-rhyme character “There was an old lady who swallowed a ……” As the story is read aloud by Glynn, the child is asked to locate each object in the array placed in front of them to target vocabulary words. Once the object is located, the child gets to excitedly stuff the named object into the old lady’s mysterious mouth.

That type of game naturally doesn’t work for older clients, but Glynn insists that doesn’t mean it is impossible to make therapy more interesting, personal and effective for them.

“Sometimes a person doesn’t want to color, draw or make a craft, so I always have traditional games to fall back on,” she said.

Keeping the client interested in communication therapy is the aim of Kelly Glynn '10, who when necessary crafts her own props to make the session engaging for young and old alike. The pictured child practices the words of various objects, then places them in the "mouth" of a trashcan made into "There was an old lady who swallowed a ..."

One client, an 80-year-old man with Broca’s Aphasia — difficulty with expressive communication — was becoming bored with monotonous tasks used to elicit language. Glynn introduced him to the iPad, but he made it crystal clear that he didn’t like technology.

“He kept shaking his head ‘no’ at me,” Glynn said. “Very long story short, that was the beginning of my client using the iPad as an augmentative communication device. At the end of his session, his wife was crying over how much it had helped him. And he kept saying, ‘change my life.’”

Mary Emm, a SUNY Cortland lecturer in communication disorders and sciences, first noticed Glynn when she turned in a notebook assigned for a course. The binding was gaily decorated using “scrapbooking” technique, unlike anyone else’s before or since.

“Kelly was one of the more creative student clinicians that I’ve ever worked with here,” Emm said.

The young speech and language disabilities major would soon set herself apart by reaching out with creative flair to the real-life clients who came into SUNY Cortland’s Center for Speech, Language and Hearing Disorders, said Emm, who also served as Glynn’s clinical supervisor.

“She developed very elaborate activities to engage her client and often made the materials herself, such as games or decorations,” said Emm.

“She really made therapy come to life. It was a joy watching her in therapy.”

In fact, working with her client inside the McDonald Building — where the center was located before moving to the Professional Studies Building — was where Glynn conceived the idea of taking her client to outer space, which would years later be featured in “Glimpses.”

“(My professors) told me, ‘Kelly, if you want to be creative, now is your time because you’re working with only one client and you will never have the time to be this creative again,’” Glynn said.

A magna cum laude graduate from SUNY Cortland, she earned her Master of Arts in Speech Language Pathology from Hofstra University in 2012 and today works in a private practice where she completed a Hofstra internship.

At 25, she’s pretty satisfied with her work.

“I want to tell young people, ‘Don’t get so hung up on the textbooks you buy and follow that for your whole life. It’s okay to think out of the box.’ I want to show them how to target their goals in a more unique way.

“You’re with this person for an hour a week every week, why not have fun?” Glynn said. “It’s about teaching therapists that there are so many different ways to get the same job done.”