Cozy chats about speech, language and learning
Creating goals for students is a process that is always evolving. Sometimes it is helpful to see how others have constructed their goals to be able to refine the ones that we are developing. Here are examples of Summer 2017 URI student clinicians constructed according…
What is Executive Functioning? Johnny races into the room and you can nearly feel the wind as he passes you by. His desk is a mess and homework papers if returned, look like they were run over by a truck. If you inform the parent…
When we are writing social skills goals for IEPs although we are looking at the big picture we need to narrow down our topic so that it is achievable in the time that we to work with the student. If we have a child who…
When you are working with a student that has language and social pragmatic difficulties it may be harder for you to verbally explain a social skill or rule. Many of these students are visual learners so you need to think of how can I assist…
There are some great commercial games that will assist students in learning not just pragmatics but problem-solving and inferencing. You just need to make sure that you are giving them the supports they need to play. Guess Who Here is one support: it is…
My students love this game! You have been invited to a Potluck dinner What are you bringing to the potluck? Can we guess what it might be? This is a receptive/expressive language activity that can be played multiple ways. I was trying to have my…
It is great that there are so many great materials that can be used in speech therapy but we need to recognize that these are tools and not the therapy. So just as you would not say that a house was built by a ‘hammer’…
Conversations for most of us happens naturally without too much thought. How then do we make the analysis of this skill to teach it to someone who is having difficulty with this? We are nearly taking an autopsy of conversation and dissecting the parts of…
Social skills, language pragmatic skills can be difficult to write goals for. If you think about the skills in the same way that you consider other language skills this might be a good first start. You need to make an analysis of what you want…
In working with teachers or student speech and language therapist I often find that one of the goals that they want to work on is ‘eye contact’. At first glance, this might make sense as how do we know if a child is listening…