Today we are chatting with Maria Papas, an elementary school SLP from Minnesota. In January 2020, Maria rescued a 10 week old puppy named Diggity…and then the COVID pandemic began. She poured all of her spare time into training Diggity to become a therapy dog. Throughout the journey, she learned a lot about dog behavior, communication and training. In this episode, Maria shares information about the process of training and certifying a therapy dog, as well as how she incorporates Diggity into speech therapy sessions for different treatment areas such as fluency, language, articulation, and social communication.

Resources:

IG handle: diggity_do

Alliance of Therapy Dogs - https://www.therapydogs.com/