The best lesson plans don’t work if you do not have a student’s cooperation. Something that I have found is that by allowing the student some control of a situation you are able to not only garner their attention and focus but the efforts…

The opening of the new school year is going to be a challenging one this year. There rightfully is a great deal of anxiety as there is a multitude of plans offered for school reopening. It is hard to prepare for something so fluid especially…

One of the continuing education courses I am taking this summer is ISTE SUMMER ACADEMY.  I have been inspired by Joesph South at ISTE talk about resilient learning systems that are adaptable to any situation. Think of learning first and technology second. I have been…

The most important thing that parents can do to assist their children in education is to read to them.  Reading opens up new worlds to your child, stimulates their imagination, and exposes them to vocabulary that is not common in conversation. Reading promotes cognitive development.…

As I transition to distance learning I am learning new things every day. Some of what I have learned is that there is even a greater need to think about what will motivate your students to show up and complete the work you assign. You…

Aided Language Input When working with children that are using an augmentative communication system it is important that every child has their own personal communication system. It is also important the adults that are interacting with the children are using a similar symbol system so…

As speech and language pathologists,  we evaluate student’s speech and language skills. Although there is a wealth of evaluation tools for students for speech and language it is sometimes difficult to find tools for our students with severe disabilities. We especially want a tool that…

One of the shifts in working with students with significant disabilities has been the selection of vocabulary that we teach and how we introduce that. Previously we would teach concrete nouns that were in the child’s environment or were part of a lesson. It would…

I have been a speech and language pathologist, for now, forty-one years and over that time I have experienced changes in how we conduct therapy as research further defines best practices. One area that has been rapidly changing is in our work with students with…

  Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) is constantly evolving not just the technology surrounding it but also the vocabulary that we emphasis as we teach it. I have been in the field for forty-one years and have seen the transformation of how we think of AAC.…