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…

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.…

This has been a FABULOUS summer integrating gamification, technology, and active learning during a graduate course at Providence college on Language Disorders. Regretfully this is the last summer as the program it was part of has at this point been discontinued. It has been a…

One of my favorite things to do in the summer is read on the beach.  When that reading transforms my thinking or my practice of teaching I feel doubly gifted. Edrenaline Rush by John Meehan is one such book. This may end up being a series as…

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…

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…

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.