[Source: Cheerful Speech Chatter] Years ago, I created a “Brain of a Resource Teacher” for a friend of mine to remind her how awesome she was at her very demanding job. I decided to tweak what I had done for SLPs to help us celebrate how talented, creative, and important we are! Enjoy! Follow […]
[Source: Cheerful Speech Chatter] Years ago, I created a “Brain of a Resource Teacher” for a friend of mine to remind her how awesome she was at her very demanding job. I decided to tweak what I had done for SLPs to help us celebrate how talented, creative, and important we are! Enjoy! Follow […]
Today, I would like to give you a peek into my speech-language therapy room at my K-6 elementary school. If you know me at all, you know I love decorating! My philosophy is that I
This is a beautiful printable weekly to-do list for speech language pathologists. This to do list features aqua blue text and dividers, with a sketched brain in the corner. "What's and SLP to do..." Features: - 8.5x11 digital pdf download - Compatible with upload to Notability App
If your student is having a hard time focusing on their schoolwork these days why not try games instead! Read through for a list of my favorite OT Teletherapy games that can be played off-screen and on-screen. Shhh! They won’t know they are still learning through play!
I absolutely love the great outdoors. I believe that my devolution to the wilderness stems from my youth and the fact that I was almost always outside while growing up. As a child, I was never really into video games or television; instead, I opted for activities such as drawing pictures outside and...
Today we have a guest post by Kelly H from Speech2U. Kelly has been an ASHA certified Speech Language Pathologist for 15 years. She has worked with children of all ages in clinics, charter schools and in telepractice. She has a passion for incorporating play, movement based and functional activities within my therapy sessions. One of my favorite skills to work with older children is inferencing. So I'm really excited (and a little nervous) about my first guest post for Carrie's one year blog-a-versary. Today, I'd like to share how I teach inferencing and some of my favorite inferencing resources. I start by telling my clients that we are going to be working on inferencing. We define inferencing as the ability to look at the information provided and then make a guess about what we think is going to happen. Inferencing: improves social skills improves reading skills improves language skills We talk about HOW LONG a book would be if the author had to write every little thing down. Usually, we decide we don't want to read a book that is THAT long. When teaching inferences, I'm less concerned about the correct answer and more interested in the PROCESS that the child used to make the inference. So usually I will have them guess the inference and then circle or TELL me the clues they used to figure out the inference. Then I have them explain why it couldn't have been a different choice. In the above example, it couldn't have been a restaurant because the boy went up to the COUNTER to order. It couldn't have been a Mexican restaurant because he ordered a HAMBURGER. I'm always looking for new ways to teach inferences. Here are some of my Favorite resources or products: 1. Super Duper Cards: Super Duper has sets of actual inferencing cards which are pretty basic. They also have some of the available as an App. 2. No Glamour Inferences by Linguisystems. I send these worksheets home for home programming. My favorite section is the section on Object Inferences. This book also works on Social inferencing which is helpful for many of my clients. 3. David Newmonic Inferencing book. This is my go to resource for Middle school students. This ebook does a great job of breaking down inferences into pictures, sentences, paragraph level material and then a full text. The material is more appropriate to older clients. 4. Phil Tulga-Inference Riddles online. This game is played online. The clues are given one at a time. You get 10 chances to guess the term. These are more abstract concepts such as "day." You can also buy an expanded version of this for 4.95 on his site. 5. What's in the Bag game on ReadWriteThink.org: I like using this online game with younger clients. Three words are presented and the student needs to guess what's in the bag. You can present it with just the clues or click continue to get three color choices. If you haven't been on Readwritethink.org's website you are missing out. 6. The Bag Game app by all4mychild ($1.99 on iTunes). Similar to the game above. One student selects an item to put in a bag and the others take turns asking questions to figure out what is in the bag. There are question prompts for kids who have more difficulty. Do you guys work on inferencing? If so I'd love to hear your favorite materials or resources. Thanks again Carrie for letting me come over and celebrate! Thank you Kelly! You can follow Kelly on her blog, Speech2U, on Facebook, and on Teachers Pay Teachers. By the way, Kelly also donated her TPT item Stoplight Emotions for my Facebook giveaways happening this week! Make sure you head over to my Facebook page to join in on the fun!
Download this set to provide practice with idioms to your students with a matching card set and printable worksheets.
I have been working with preschool age children with speech and language deficits for many years now and I have found, for me, the most ef...
Today's guest post is brought to you by Jess from Figuratively Speeching. Jess has been a Speech-Language Pathologist for 18 years, graduating with her Masters Degree in 1995. She has worked in private practice, a private special education school, as a contractor, and in a public school district. She loves her career and spends a lot of time creating her own materials. I don’t know about you, but with the implementation of common core, high stakes testing, and teachers complaining about you pulling their students out of class, justifying my services to teachers and administrators has become an almost daily part of my job. The principal stopped me one day to say, ”Teachers are complaining that you are pulling students out of their classes and they want to know what you are teaching their students. How are they supposed to make up the work they miss? You need to do their classwork with them and make sure they don’t miss important concepts.” I am not a classroom teacer, nor am I an aide. My groups consist of three to five students from at least two different classes, and at times, three different grades, so you can guess the thoughts running through my head, “How will I do their classwork and work on the prerequisite strategies my students need to be able to learn their vocabulary, comprehend multiple step directions, retain information, improve grammatical skills, work on fluency and articulation…. ?” My mind was spinning out of control! When I first began working in the Middle School, I realized that pull out sessions, while wonderful and intensive and giving me the ability to hone in on their specific skills, did not allow me much opportunity to collaborate with teachers. I began pushing in to the three grade level self-contained classrooms so I could see the topics and vocabulary introduced and then work on those skills in therapy. But, at annual reviews, vocabulary testing did not show as much progress. Why not? I did not address much in the way of Tier 2 words, those words that are not academic core vocabulary words that teachers need worked on for their high stakes testing and to show improvement over the course of the year for themselves. Our testing does not typically include those tier 3 words. If you don’t know about tiered vocabulary, here is a link to an article that will explain it. What now? While I still pushed into the classroom, my sessions incorporated the concepts taught, but not necessarily the vocabulary. For instance, I love the 6th grade social studies curriculum, learning about the ancient civilizations. There are so many ways we can address our goals while helping students retain information from their classes. While my student learned about Mesopotamia, I taught them Tier 2 words my students would need to know to be able to respond to questions on tests, such as analyze, classify, compare, contrast, discuss, evaluate, explain, illustrate, justify…. You can find a packet with those words and more on my freebie tab here. We worked on comparing and contrasting information, how society today compared to Mesopotamian society, responded to questions from nonfiction articles, made flip books with vocabulary, etc. Here is a template of a flipbook I created: As the children moved onto each new culture, we reviewed new material and compared it to previous cultures. It was a lot of fun. The students remembered information from all of the different societies, I addressed my goals, the teachers were happy that I could show them that we worked on material related to their classwork, and my principal came in to observe and was thrilled with my lesson. Annual review time came about, and lo and behold, there was progress in all areas. Tier 2 vocabulary had been addressed, I was able to incorporate academic work, and I could show progress in all areas, not just vocabulary. Now, just because I incorporate curriculum content does not mean that I do not want my speech sessions to be fun. Here are three activities that I incorporated into my sessions: 1. Scattergories: Have students work alone or in pairs for this activity. For fun, I use the original game rules, where you pick a letter (I wrote out letters on index cards, folded them, put them in a container, and then picked a letter from there) and each student or pair has to write down items from as many categories as they can with the letter chosen. This can be tough, depending on the categories chosen, but I like it for word retrieval, vocabulary, as well as creative thinking. Another way I have used this game is to have the ten categories include topics from their classwork. In the middle school, I like to use their science and social studies curriculum. 2. Create-your-own Books: I love being crafty, but my Middle and High schoolers roll their eyes at me if I suggest making something even remotely crafty with them. They do like making different types of books that incorporate their curriculum. Flip books are one example of books I use with them. They are wonderful for vocabulary, but you can also use them for sequencing information about a topic or the steps required for an activity, grammar, and so many more ways. See the above picture for an example of how I make a flip book. 3. Jeopardy-like games: This has always been one of my favorite games to do with students. It is a quick way to assess their knowledge of vocabulary and other topics, and my students always love to compete against each other. You can make it as high-tech (power-point) or low tech (index cards on a magnetic board or library pockets mounted on poster board with questions in the pockets) as you would like. Keeping track of data is easy with game formats like these, and the questions can be presented throughout the unit to demonstrate progress. ~ Jess Thank you Jess! You can follow Jess on her blog, Figuratively Speeching, on Facebook, and on TPT.
by Hanna Bogen I’d like to dovetail on my previous post about executive functioning and its impact on the development of social-cognitive skills and pragmatic language. In its role as the brain’s “secretary,” executive functioning helps to regulate an individual’s ability to map/plan a conversation and then to follow that plan. This isn’t to say […]
I’m linking up with my friend, Jen, from SLP runner to show you some creative storage solutions for therapy materials and Teacher Pay Teachers products in particular. After about 15 years in an 8 X 8
Artifacts of a Transdisciplinary Speech-Language Pathologist
A child's development of language has some universal features, but what happens to learning language when a child is exposed to different languages is an important research topic. Some researchers now suggest that the development of nouns vs verbs is influenced by different languages.
Have I mentioned how much my son loves Star Wars? These days he seems to be nothing short of obsessed. To capitalize on his newfound interest, I decided to help him write his own Star Wars adventures. To make this less like a writing exercise and more like a game, I took cues from Education.com’s Fairy Tale Dice activity. I used Styrofoam cubes purchased from a local craft store, covered them in construction paper, and added stickers from a Star Wars Lego sticker book. While I made a total of six dice, fewer would work just as well. You want to have at least three though: 1. One with six different characters. 2. One with six verbs (e.g., fights, rescues, captures, escapes, flies, and helps). 3. Others can have enemies, places, or adjectives. I color-coded my blocks (good guys and ships are white, bad guys and their vehicles are brown, and verbs are green). Once your dice are made, print some handwriting paper (I like the printable handwriting papers on DonnaYoung.com). Now it’s time for your son/daughter to get rolling (forgive the corny pun). As your child rolls the dice, help them weave together the characters, verbs, and places into a story. I was amazed the first time I ‘played’ this with my son! I wrote on the top of his first page, “In a galaxy far far away.” He kept wanting to roll more and soon had written “Han Solo and a Ewok rescued a rebel trooper from a battle droid.” That is quite possibly the longest sentence I have EVER gotten him to write at home. It was such a beautiful moment I swear I could hear a choir singing “Hallelujah.” Now each time we get out the Star Wars Story Dice, we add one new sentence to his story. Tip: To make it seem more like a real book, put the pages into a 3-pronged folder.
A place to share speech and language therapy ideas and materials.
Are you and your students tired of flipping cards? This just may change your SLP life! Want to spice up your articulation drill? Then this resource is for you! These cans and sticks came about because using the same old articulation cards was getting old. I switched to cans full of tongue depressors that contain target sounds {pictures} on them to use for therapy, and they immediately changed my students' engagement in therapy! They can change yours, too! Many SLPs use this resource for language or mixed groups, too. ⚠️ Download or view the preview for a closer look, and read about how to make and use this resource. What's in this download? ► Images for 210 tongue depressors that change wooden sticks from tongue depressors to articulation sticks! ► Images for theses sounds are included: /r/, vocalic r, /r/ blends, /s/, /z/, /s/ blends, sh, ch, j, /l/, /l /blends, /k/, /g/, /f/, /v/, /t/, /d/, /b/, and /p/ ► 2 pages for your students to sort their sticks by position (or "where" they hear the word when addressing phonological awareness) ► 1 page for students to write sentences with the word on the sticks they pick (if desired) ► A master list of words for each sound ► A "Whoo can say their speech sounds?" sign to post with your cans (if desired) ► Printable labels for the cans What's not in this download? ► The cans, tongue depressors, adhesive or paper you may choose to wrap the cans with are obviously not included :) To read all about the DIY and multiple ways to use these cans, follow this link. If you like this resource, you will also like: ✱ Articulation Cans Expansion Pack with more of these sounds PLUS “th,” /w/, /j/, /h/, /m/ and /n/! ✱ Articulation Cans Add On FREEBIE with more /r/, /s/, /z/, ch and j sticks! ✱ Or see ALL of my articulation resources HERE . I hope you will use this resource over and over again for years to come! Enjoy! ⚫ Find more from me at my ➔ Website ➔ TpT ➔ IG ➔ FB ➔ YouTube ➔ Free Resource Library ➔ Pinterest
