Buzzing about Speech & Language
As SLPs, we all use prompting in our speech therapy sessions. It helps us build upon what a child already knows by scaffolding the skills that we target. There are many forms of prompts and scaffolds. We’ve spent time talking about the importance of verbal prompts and visual prompts in the past. Today, let’s chat about ways to use gestural… Read More
One of the most common goals that I see in my preschoolers is identifying action verbs. This isn’t surprising. They need to understand actions before they are able to follow directions, give a command, or put sentences together. Understanding how to teach action verbs to young children can be kind of tricky. If you show your student the same picture… Read More
I remember when I met one of my preschool language students for the first time. He had just turned 3 and was transitioning to the schools from our birth to 3 program. I think a good word to describe him would be “energetic.” Admittedly, I wasn’t prepared for the energy. There was a lot of, “Look at the book. Oh,… Read More
A while back I was charged to do an in-service for the paraprofessionals at my school. I talked to them about using prompts and cues in speech therapy and in the classroom. Fortunately, the paras did great and were immediately able to start implementing some of the strategies we discussed! All that to say, I hope that this blog post… Read More
In my previous post, we discussed several different contexts and ways to implement core words. Let’s talk about some specific research-based therapy strategies to help you while teaching core words in your speech therapy sessions. 1. Explicit Instruction When you introduce a new core word, be sure to explicitly teach the word before expecting the student use it. MODEL how… Read More
Implementing core words in speech therapy is a widely-known, research-based practice among SLPs. Teaching these words to students with expressive language deficits is highly effective because: Core words are much more versatile than concrete nouns. You need fewer words to be an effective communicator when using core vocabulary. Because core words lend themselves to forming phrases easily, it creates more… Read More
What kind of books do you use in your speech therapy sessions? I am a book therapy kind of girl, so I’ve got lots of speech therapy book ideas for you. Picture books are SO versatile and can be used to target nearly all of my student’s speech and language goals. Just give me a good book companion, some sweet… Read More
Today I’m starting a new series on my blog that addresses a much-needed topic (for me at least): scaffolding. Together we’ll look at a few strategies and supports to help our students with language difficulties. This will definitely get me ready to kick it into high gear when school begins in a couple of weeks. So grab yourself a hot… Read More
You know that feeling when you are giving the CELF to a student and you get to the formulating sentences subtest? It’s a mixture of dread and curiosity for me. That subtest is not my favorite because sometimes scoring can be subjective, plus it takes forever. But I’m always curious at how my student will perform. It gives a great… Read More
Last week was all about Thanksgiving in my speech room. I thought I’d share a Target dollar spot find with you that my kids had a blast with! This came in one big roll of Thanksgiving fun. I separated it out and made a couple rows, since my speech room wasn’t big enough to spread the whole thing out! We… Read More
