Assessment drives instruction. Evaluation data helps to drive the instruction of a student. When we take baseline we get a direction for our teaching.  Prior to seeing a new student/client, we read through their records to develop a picture and to make a group of…

My mother is from Kinvara, County Galway, Ireland.   As children,  we would go there for summers to live on my grandparent’s farm. They lived in a thatched cottage with chickens in the front yard and calves in the back of the house.  My mother is…

One of the options for speech therapy for articulation is the traditional approach.  Back in the dark ages ( or when I was being trained as a speech and language therapist), the researchers prescribed a sequence of treatment for children that had difficulty saying sounds.…

Constructing goals can be a difficult task. If you think about this process as a multi-step activity it will assist you. You begin treatment with a student by reviewing the history of the child. In reading this and speaking with the family you may have…

When we write a lesson plan we are integrating information from what we know about a client and what we want to know about the client. I understand that It may be difficult sometimes to write the beginning lesson plans as you are needing to…

How do you work with mixed groups in speech and language therapy? Working in groups in speech and language therapy can be challenging. Often the students will not all be on the same level. You may need to work with a classroom group in which…

What does the speech and language pathologist need to know about Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act HIPAA? Do you quickly scroll through the privacy protections on websites that are asking you for private information? Do you read the privacy rights that are sent with your…

Someone asked me the other day what was I doing for fun. I was being a lifelong learner! At the beginning of the year 2018, there was an announcement that the Rhode Island Foundation in conjunction with the Rhode Island Department of Education and the University…

We need to think about research-based approaches and not materials when we think of our speech and language treatment plans.

There is an inter-relationship between, reading, spelling, handwriting, and written expression that needs to be honored when we think about teaching reading. There are multiple areas in the brain that are essential in learning how to read. Our instruction, therefore, needs to be explicit, systematic, cumulative, and multi-sensory.