Author: sashabro89

Sasha Balofsky is a speech therapist living in Philly. Between work and Shabbat, she takes artistic solace in writing, playing Harry Potter songs on her flute, and attending her women’s chassidus groups. Her best friends encouraged her to write, including her husband.

Sentence Combining Activities: The Roundup

Resource shows that sentence combing is a really effective way to expand and improve syntax or sentence structure for our adolescent students with Specific Language Impairment; however, *finding* free or low-cost and easily accessible activities that target this skill can be a challenge. This is why I am excited to share all the wonderful sentence … Continue reading Sentence Combining Activities: The Roundup →

No Prep Vocabulary Activities for Middle & High School

Secondary school students with language impairments are often quite behind their peers in vocabulary, and it can be difficult to know where to start with them; moreover, we want to find a way to target their vocabulary deficit and use middle/high school class and curriculum materials. How do we make sure we are targeting vocabulary, … Continue reading No Prep Vocabulary Activities for Middle & High School →

Middle School Language Goals

I don't know about you but when I first started working in middle school, I was tough to transition from elementary to secondary level speech & language goals. Students in middle and high school are spending less time reading narrative or stories and more reading expository non-fiction texts. They are "reading to learn" and need … Continue reading Middle School Language Goals →

Virtual Grammar and Sentence Combining Resource for Teens

Grammar and sentence structure goals are pretty common for our middle and high school speech and language students, yet it can be difficult to come up with ways to target them that keep our students engaged.  I find my students get sick of answering questions about pictures quickly and also find some of those grammar … Continue reading Virtual Grammar and Sentence Combining Resource for Teens →

Teaching Complex Sentences III: Comprehending in Paragraphs

If you've been following my posts Teaching Complex Sentences and Teaching Complex Sentences II: Lengthy Nouns, you may already know that many students with SLI struggle with comprehension at the sentence structure level and need explicit instruction.  We've previously discussed having students learn simple definitions for subordinate conjunctions and practice their uses in sentences as … Continue reading Teaching Complex Sentences III: Comprehending in Paragraphs →

Vocabulary Description Guide for Teens and Tweens

I don't know about you, but I have found those HedBanz questions pretty inadequate for teaching my students how to describe vocabulary.  Similarly, EET type guides or TPT visuals that focus on category, function, location, etc can be great for basic nouns but insufficient to teach students to describe the higher-level tier 2 vocabulary (including … Continue reading Vocabulary Description Guide for Teens and Tweens →

Teaching Students with SLI about Dialect and Code-Switching

Because I work at a fairly diverse district, I hear a lot of different dialects being spoken by my students.  I do not write goals around it because obviously students are entitled to their culture and speaking style; however, I do like to at least teach students that they speak a different dialect that may … Continue reading Teaching Students with SLI about Dialect and Code-Switching →

Sketch and Speak: Teaching Students to Take Pictograph Notes in Speech Therapy

One of the major issues I encounter with secondary school students is they both don’t know how to and are generally unwilling to take notes on what they read.  Recently, this got me thinking about a sketching/pictograph technique I used all the way in my student clinic days called Stickwriting wherein the student basically took … Continue reading Sketch and Speak: Teaching Students to Take Pictograph Notes in Speech Therapy →

Co-Articulation Tips for Teaching /R/

Oh, the dreaded /r/ sound.  When I first started as a speech therapist, I didn't know where to begin with this sound.  Now 4 years later, I have a lot more elicitation techniques within my arsenal: the KARLA method, the single-word /r/ screener, and of course many methods discussed in Pam Marshalla's Successful R Therapy … Continue reading Co-Articulation Tips for Teaching /R/ →