Buzzing about Speech & Language
A super common preschool or kindergarten goal for my students is spatial concepts (and also object functions and action verbs). To teach a skill effectively, you want to be confident in the why and how of what you’re doing, right? Today, we’re chatting about the benefits of teaching spatial concepts and a few quick tips on how to do it!… Read More
As a school-based SLP, tackling preschool language therapy can be both challenging and rewarding. Helping young children develop their language skills is crucial to their academic and social success in the future. However, it can sometimes be difficult to find engaging and effective activities that hold their attention and provide the necessary stimulation for their language development. After years of… Read More
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
