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SPARK Cards: A First Person Review Of A Versatile Resource

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Original Spark Cards Kit

It’s always exciting for me to review a product, especially one as versatile as SPARK Cards!  I can appreciate the hard work involved in creating educational items and the effort needed in promoting the tool.  This is an honest review of how I found benefit in using SPARK Cards for sequencing in my private practice.  

SPARK Cards Pros

Over the years, I have used SPARK Cards in my home office and teletherapy sessions with good success across a wide variety of ages, abilities, and settings.  Some of my favorite features include:

  • Durable cardboard cards with a gloss finish to withstand being handled by many, little hands
  • Ability to use a dry erase marker to bring attention to teaching concepts
  • Functional stories that support making connections to daily living
  • Detailed descriptions for each card in a sequence to make session planning easier for the busy SLP and facilitate generalization of skills in the home setting
  • Hypothetical problem solving probes for each topic
  • Appropriate for children as young as four years old through middle school-aged clients

Teletherapy

I used these cards in teletherapy in two, different ways.  One of my clients is working towards sentence formulation for functional tasks, so I scanned and loaded the Going to the Library deck in sequential order so we could address his goal without taxing the activity with sequencing.  This particular deck is my favorite in the collection because we can talk about the library year round.  I also like that the library itself mirrors a dated one that has patrons returning and checking out books the old fashioned way by handing them to a librarian.  It’s a nice way to compare/contrast past and present features.  I added some humor to the activity by joking about seeing a ladder.  We addressed answering yes/no questions and problem solving in a lighthearted way that I feel improves engagement and attention in any task.
 
The second way that I used the sequencing cards was via my document camera.  Another virtual client needs to improve sequencing skills, so I took three at a time from the Making a Lemonade Stand deck to provide choices while addressing sequential ordering.  The three cards with kitchen backgrounds are my favorite ones in this series because I could again work on comparing/contrasting room features in the pictures to my client’s kitchen.  Making these kinds of connections helps strengthen memory skills and brings much more meaning to our language activity.  

Recommendations

While I LOVE the convenient portability of the SPARK collection and ease at which I can store it in my ever growing therapy closet, I would like to see the cards enlarged a little.  Some of the smaller features are missed in my office sessions as I cannot magnify or zoom in on the cards as I can online.  There is just so much fabulous detail in each card, that I would be saddened if my clients missed them.
I would highly recommend SPARK cards for home practice of all the above-mentioned language skills. Even children working on articulation goals could utilize this product, especially those needing drills at the sentence/conversational level.  Specifically, the acronym SPARK stands for the following language probes embedded in each sequencing deck:
 
Sequencing and sentence formulation
Predicting, problem solving, picture interpretation
Analyzing and answering ‘WH’ questions (WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE)
Retelling a story and reasoning skills
Knowledge of basic concepts and vocabulary

This comprehensive, affordable product promotes improving language skills at home. Since my original review, the developers launched more decks: SPARK collection 2 and SPARK Junior (appropriate for children 3 years and older).
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