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.…

BOOK SORT: Either gather up a selection of books in your home or classroom or have your child pick books off the bookshelf.  * Ask your child to sort them into piles Once they have done this ask them how they chose to sort them.…

During COVID-19 there are a variety of fabulous companies offering free resources. Sometimes it is hard to keep up with all the offerings. One that I wanted to make everyone aware of was the American Speech and Language Association’s Learning Pass. LEARNING PASS Through June…

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…

Have you needed to take the plunge into distance learning?  The above picture illustrates my rapid need to quickly get up to speed on creating Distance Learning Plans for my varied caseload. Luckily it seems as if the whole community has reached out to assist…

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.…