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
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
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
With the school year wrapping up, I felt inspired to do an escape-the-room type activity with my speech & language middle school students. I'm still on a tight budget, so I kept things simple.
Complex sentences are the bread and butter of academic subjects. Language arts, science, and even math classes are rife with long, complex sentences that students with speech/language impairments find difficult to decipher. Speech-Language Pathologists sometimes point out that complex sentences with conjunctions have been explicitly taught in regular and special education classrooms, so what can … Continue reading Teaching Complex Sentences
For students with language disorders, definitions are tough work. So how does an SLP break down the skill of defining words into manageable steps? One word: templates!
Context clues activities are hard to select because we don't know exactly which words are familiar or partially familiar to the student. Nonsense word context clues eliminate the confounding variable of prior word knowledge or exposure and allow my students to focus exclusively on using their pre-taught context clue skill.
Grammar & Sentence Structures Difficulties in Middle & High School I've noticed a trend when it comes to working on grammar and sentence structure with middle and high school speech & language therapy students. My students often look like they have "mastered" their various IEP speech/language goals: subject-verb agreement, copula use, & even complex sentences. … Continue reading Adolescent Grammar & Sentence Structure
By the time my speech therapy students are in older grades, it can be difficult to change their perspective on reading. They will say they hate reading, that it is "boring", and that they are not successful at it. Consequently, I find that working on skills like identifying main idea or summarizing to be a … Continue reading An Active, More Hands-On Approach to Main Idea
We've all been there. It's a busy week with IEPs and evaluation/re-evaluations galore. The paperwork is overflowing, you're feeling sick, and you reach for the pre-printed worksheet. Maybe it's one on context clues or complex sentences or prefixes or root words. Maybe it's an article where they have to answer questions about main idea and … Continue reading Just Say No to Multiple Choice Worksheets
