Coloring My Daughter’s Conversation

What Is Color My Conversation?

We were blessed to have the opportunity to review Color My Conversation from Northern Speech Services. This is a series of lessons designed to teach children how to communicate and enhance personal relationships for a lifetime. The lessons were originally designed for use by speech therapists to use with children struggling with speech disabilities, or autism, or even with children who are recovering from trauma.

Will It Enhance Your Homeschool?

Absolutely! My daughter and I worked through six weeks of the 14 weeks of lessons and not only did it make a dramatic difference for her, it also taught me to understand what a conversation means and how to use it effectively. I think that this product is wonderful for anyone, even adults. After all, you learned to spell, and read, and do math, but have you ever sat down to think about how you go about communicating effectively with others? Did you realize that there are different classes of conversations that you can have with people in different situations? I never knew that there is a simple and effective way to dissect and componetize a conversation so that you can easily communicate. This is what Color My Conversation teaches you.

What Comes With The Color My Conversation Kit?

The Color My Conversation Kit includes everything you need to teach the 14-16 weeks of lessons.

Northern Speech Services Color My Conversation

The package comes with
• Floor Stepping Stones (8, in various colors)
• Floor Lightning Bolts (4)
• Wall Poster
• Wall Display (9 punch out sheets)
• Picture Cards (100)
• Game Tokens (50)
• Dry Erase Markers (2)
• Game Board
• Cloth Ribbon
• Color My Conversation Ball
• Color My Conversation Music CD
• Instructional Manual CD

Also we had access to video lessons online at Northern Speech Services website.

Suggested Use

You begin each lesson with a song (if you have teenagers who are ‘past’ singing songs, then you can just read them). Then you spend about half an hour working with your child to teach her the conversation skill for the week. This includes a discussion (Northern Speech Services calls this training time), practice and role playing (this is the part my teenage daughter had to get used to, but she did it fairly quickly), a wrap up review and homework (which we did orally), and a final discussion.

The program uses color and songs to reinforce the conversational concepts in a subtle and very effective way. You use floor tiles that your child can stand next to (or on) which are colored to remind you both of the part of conversation.

This is a very active curriculum.

You will find yourself tossing a ball, writing ideas on colorful tiles (stones), hanging up an ever-growing wall display, singing, and of course talking with your child. All the colors and songs are designed (very well) to reinforce and remind your child (and you) of the parts and the different types of conversations.

Northern Speech Services recommends that you begin with the first lesson, even if your children are older, but they also offer support to help you decide where to begin in the lesson sequence.

Time Required To Teach This

Preparation Time: 30 minutes (read material, watch teaching videos, make notes, practice what you will say. note: I am not an extrovert and generally do better writing than speaking so I wrote out what I would say since nothing kills a lesson with my daughter faster than reading dialog or instructions off a sheet of paper to her.)

Teaching Time: 45-60 minutes (The time here depends on how much your child likes the lesson for the day and how receptive she is to practicing conversations. When we first started, my daughter ended up laying on the floor laughing, mostly out of embarrassment but also because I was trying to use the conversations from the video and they really did not fit with a mother-daughter teaching scenario.)

Practice Time: As much as you can between lessons, integrated into every day life. (My daughter used her time teaching at the karate dojo as a testbed for her to practice each new conversational skill. This gave her practice with parents, children, and peers. She also practiced at home with her father and brother.)

How We Used It

Each week I spent some time reviewing the teaching material and prepping my conversations. Then my daughter and I would retreat to her bedroom to go through the lesson together. I used a wall in her bedroom to hang the each lesson’s additions to the wall display. That way she could see it every day and remind herself of the conversational strategies for the week.

The tough part was getting my daughter to role-play during the first few sessions – most especially since all teens are more self-conscious. After she got over that small hurdle, my daughter looked forward to each new session and the new conversation strategies she learned.

The only hard bit was really my own hurdle. It took a few sessions to realize that I need to translate each lesson using the video and written instructions and tutorials into the same conversational style which I normally have with my daughter.

Did We Like It?

Oh, boy howdy – did we ever!

I noticed a difference even after the first session. The afternoon after my daughter and I began the first lesson of Color My Conversation, she went to teach at her martial arts studio. Usually these volunteer teaching sessions are proceeded by fear and nervousness as she tries to figure out how to communicate with the students and their parents ahead of time.

This afternoon, though, she did not appear nervous at all and once the families started showing up, she fell right into the “yellow” conversations we had practiced together. She understood the “yellow” conversation, internalized it, and was busily putting it to practice. It turns out that this simple conversation is a wonderful one to use with little children and as a result her students were also more relaxed and happy.

As the weeks progressed and she learned the more complex conversation frameworks, my daughter grew more and more comfortable. Now she moves easily through her teaching, is making friends easily, and does not how through the agony that plagued her before we began Color my Conversation.

This program is absolutely great for kids like my daughter!