Education

I love working with music with my students. Something that they are reluctant to do when presented as a work task they will do when it is incorporated into a song. This song is 5 little monkeys hanging from a tree. It uses a count…

My plan this summer was to create units using literature and having all the resources in one place.  As I have been using children’s literature I have been able to discover that there are some stories in which some of the extensions to create deeper…

I have always loved incorporating rhymes and music into my lessons.  Music assists in memory, developing language, and often a child’s first vocalization can come as they try to sing along. When we are working with children with minimal verbal language skills we need to…

In the summer of 2015 students at Providence College had a project to examine communication disorders  and to construct a lesson plan for a read aloud. They needed to take a trade book with a multicultural theme and prepare a 3-day lesson plan that incorporated…

  We have been spending a great deal of time understanding oral language.  Why is this important for written language?  What is the correlation? Here is a great PowerPoint from the Department of Education: Oral and written language2 Some have found the paragraph’s graphs confusing…

In class we have been reviewing the three tiers of vocabulary which basically are: Tier 1: Everyday words ( Car, oatmeal, school, lunch) Tier 2: Vocabulary used by mature language users across several content areas. Because of their lack of redundancy in oral language, Tier…

Entrance and Exit Criteria: Who is eligible for speech and language services in the schools? When do you exit? These are important questions that are understood not just by speech and language pathologists but also by teachers, administrators and families. Why does one child get…

Sometimes our therapy can seem like we are just ‘ playing’  with our students, however, the reality is that we are employing therapeutic skills that assist in the development of language skills. In play we: Balance turn taking:  Give the students some opportunity to be the…

Writing goals is always an art.  It is sometimes helpful to see some examples. This semester here are some great goals. The names have all been changed except for the clinician names are real. Articulation Goals: Kristen wrote these goals Baseline level of performance: At…

Baseline: the starting point of therapy The first thing that one does prior to beginning therapy is to take baseline information to determine the most appropriate goals you should develop. I am writing this blog as some clinicians are having difficulty writing these. The American…