Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT) is a goal-oriented, planned, structured, and documented therapeutic intervention directed by health and human service providers as part of their profession. Animal assistance provides opportunities for animal interactions that enhance the quality of therapy. Including animals serves as a way to improve client motivation, augment student learning, and vary therapeutic activities.

The program I have developed is aimed at improving receptive, expressive, and pragmatic language for students of all levels. While not a comprehensive list, therapeutic activities include:

• Building rapport and bridging conversational barriers
• Increasing utterance length (i.e. “dog” to “big dog” to “big brown dog” etc.)
• Targeting verbs (i.e. walk, lay down, sit, pant, see)
• Targeting adjectives/descriptors (i.e. big, brown, soft, rough, tired, awake)
• Targeting specific articulation sounds
• Recognizing changes of emotion
• Formulating appropriate greetings
• Understanding animal body language
• Mitigating stress levels, especially in students who have experienced trauma