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
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
How do we teach social skills like blending with one's surrounding and following expected behaviors without it conflicting with our lessons on privacy, autonomy, and self-respect? The answer is to bring questions about values and safety to every discussion about social decision making. It is important for our students to not just see bodily autonomy, violence, or high-risk behaviors as "exceptions" to the rules of social interaction; instead, values are an intrinsic part of social problem-solving and hold the ultimate say in what we decide to do in any given situation. I've decided to create a framework that embeds questions about values and safety into the decision-mapping process.
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
What to Focus on in Adolescent Stuttering Therapy I don't know about you, but I find it difficult to get middle and high school speech therapy students to open about.... well, anything. So I've found it particularly challenging to get my students who stutter to talk about their experiences, anxieties, and self-perceptions. And this is … Continue reading Great Resources for Talking about Stuttering
Ever ask yourself why your older speech & language students struggle so greatly with fluent reading? I'll admit that this was pretty unfamiliar territory for me when I first started as a speech-language pathologist; literacy skills were not in our graduate school curriculum. But fortunately, I have found a lot of great books and online … Continue reading Advanced Phonological Awareness: The Missing Piece for Older Students Who Struggle to Read
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
