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
Category: Vocabulary
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
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
How to Use Videos for Language 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
Break-out/Escape the Room Speech Therapy Activity!
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.
Generating Definitions
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: Start with the Basics
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.
Just Say No to Multiple Choice Worksheets
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
