LINGUA TOKENS™ STORY
It Started with a Simple Question
After years of school-based speech therapy, I kept running into the same problem: I could find engaging games or I could target specific speech sounds, but I couldn't do both at the same time. The games my students loved had nothing to do with their goals. The materials that targeted their sounds? They sat flat on the table while my students' attention drifted to anything and everything other than my materials.
I started asking myself: How do I keep these little hands busy while still engaging them in therapeutic activities?
The Moment Everything Changed
One of my students' favorite games had a tile dispenser they'd slide back and forth, collecting pieces as they played. The engagement was effortless, they'd do it over and over without being asked. I kept watching them and thinking: this is what speech practice should feel like. But I couldn't target their specific sounds within the game. So I set out to create my own version, custom tokens I could load with the exact speech targets each student needed.
When reimagining what this could look like, I made a choice that changed everything: I made them round. Once I committed to that shape, the possibilities exploded. Round tokens could be spun across a table. Rolled down a ramp. Buried in kinetic sand. Slid like shuffleboard pucks. Flicked into finger-made goalposts. Dropped into water. Hidden in sensory bins. Taken outside without worrying about the wind.
My husband will tell you — I couldn't stop smiling. I was constantly pulling out my notes and jotting down new ideas. It had been a while since I'd felt so invigorated and creative about therapy materials.
Built by an SLP, for SLPs
I know what it's like to drag a rolling case of folders and printed worksheets across campus to a picnic table because you don't have a speech room. I know the frustration of watching carefully prepared materials blow away in the wind while your student loses focus. I've spent countless hours printing, cutting, and laminating, only to have materials that couldn't survive a single session with a kindergartner.
I also know what it's like to work with a 13-year-old, who's been looking at the same picture cards since second grade. But here's what I've discovered: when you put something new and unexpected in front of those older students, something sparks. Curiosity returns. Their sessions regain some of the fun they used to have back in second grade, but at their level. They're flicking tokens across the table trying to score a goal, sliding them like a shuffleboard match, or digging through kinetic sand to find their targets. Suddenly, speech therapy isn't something they endure, it's something they're actually into again.
Lingua Tokens™ were designed from inside the reality of school-based therapy. Every material choice, every design decision, comes from years of knowing what works in real sessions with real students, from preschool through middle school.
Grounded in Evidence
I'm a firm believer in the complexity approach, it was ingrained into me during grad school, and I used it with nearly all of my younger students with multiple phonological processes and sound errors. I watched it work its magic over and over: target the more complex sounds, and the simpler ones start to fall into place on their own. It's like taking a shortcut to intelligibility.
But here's what frustrated me, there weren't many materials out there to help me target clusters in sessions. So when I was developing Lingua Tokens™, I knew I needed to include the 2-element clusters with the greatest impact and 3-element clusters. The 16 phoneme sets are designed to support this evidence-based framework from the ground up.
And because the tokens are durable and portable, they can be used across settings, therapy rooms, playgrounds, classrooms, and home, supporting the varied practice contexts that research tells us promote better generalization.
More Than a Product
When I started sharing prototypes with other SLPs, something beautiful happened. They started using the tokens in ways I hadn't even imagined, incorporating them into obstacle courses, coin sorters, dramatic play, and activities I never would have thought of on my own.
That's when I realized Lingua Tokens™ aren't just my solution to a problem I had. They're an open-ended tool that adapts to whatever play-based, engaging, child-led therapy session you want to create.
Because when therapy feels like play, for the kids and for us as clinicians, everyone wins. Kids get their repetitions without realizing they're working hard. We get to be creative and spontaneous. And progress happens naturally, joyfully, and often faster than we expect.
Say Through Play
When the speech targets become the play, everything changes.