Wrapping Up

I created my website to inform everyone about how dance and speech therapy can be combined. You can find it here. I put up a page explaining what I was trying to do, a page about me, one about the benefits that can be received, and two pages for teachers and parents giving them tips on how to fins or create a program that would do this. I learned that dance works in different areas of the brain and improves brain signals throughout. Since speech is centered in different areas of the brain as well, improving brain signals will help with speech capacities. Dance is also very useful for students with dyslexia, who often attend speech therapy as well. I found some people who already have enrichment programs that allow students to be immersed in dance and speech therapy at the same time.

The presentation went very well. I had many people come up to me and express interest in my studies. Several asked me if I planned to do this in the future. It wasn't a thought I had while doing the project, but now that I am thinking about it I really could be someone who does this for a living. Because I have a background in dance and I will be learning about speech-language disorders, I could create ways to use both of them together. I could help students work on their physical skills as well as their communication skills. I will definitely be looking into ways that I could do this in the future. Hopefully in grad school I will have a way to pursue both of my interests in one place.

Looking at The Finish Line

With just a few more weeks until my 20% project is due, I am pulling together my final sources and starting to create my product that I will present to my peers and the world. I still have a few more sources that I will have to locate. I need to find a few more examples of therapists and schools who are incorporating dance into speech therapy. Once I have found these last few sources, I am going to build a web site that documents all of my findings about how dance can be combined with speech therapy to benefit students. This will demonstrate my knowledge of EDIT 2000 because it not only involves teaching and learning, but I will also have to use some of the tools I discovered in this class to find my sources and build my website. I will post some people who are using dance therapy as well as some techniques that can be used to incorporate dance. Basically I will showcase everything that I've found that relates to dance and speech therapy. I will hopefully organize my website into areas for teachers and therapists, students, and parents, as well as a basic information page so that many different audiences will be able to view and learn from the information I have collected.

I have enjoyed pursuing this 20% project because I have been able to research a topic that is really important to me while using some of the tools and knowledge I have gained in my EDIT 2000 class. I look forward to creating my web pages and showcasing them to my peers and friends.