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
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
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
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
Often, getting our students to engage with reading-based therapy tasks can feel like pulling teeth- both for students and therapist! Our school clients often present with co-morbid reading and learning disabilities that make reading a daily struggle, and so it's no wonder they immediately deflate when we put an article in front of them. My … Continue reading How to Use Videos for Language Therapy
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.
In my earlier post on complex sentences, I talked about teaching student to use and understand a variety of conjunctions. In this post, I'd like to address another area of syntax that can be challenging for students with language impairment: lengthy noun phrases.
Sick of playing board games or reading hypothetical scenarios for your speech/language therapy students to problem-solve? Tired of pulling out those dull picture cards? Well, I have finally found a problem-solving resource that is actually engaging and very practical: GCF Global. Under the Everyday Life section, there are activities about grocery shopping, making change, using … Continue reading Functional Problem-Solving Resource!
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
