Back to School

It's a race to the finish... I will officially be BACK TO SCHOOL in a week and a half... whoa!  I have created a few basic back to school themed activities especially designed for my "pint size" students.  These activities are designed to help improve knowledge of basic concepts, verbal expression, following directions, and receptive/expressive vocabulary.  Check them out!

Apples ON the School Supplies

Apples OFF of the School Supplies

Things I Do at School

To provide a multisensory experience, I used this tutorial to sew felt apples in red, yellow, and green and allowed my students to manipulate their positions as we read through the adapted books.

What activities do you like to use at the beginning of the school year?

Getting Organized

The recipe to success in the SLP-World is ORGANIZATION.  In preparation to begin my new position in a brand new school, I have been working hard to sort and develop materials to help keep everything nice and neat.

Here are a few documents that I have created.  Hope they help you in your organization ventures as well.

Binder Sheets

Calendar

Student Progress Graph

Schedule

Teacher Letter

I hope these are helpful as you begin your school year!

Parent Communication

This month's ASHA Leader has a nice article about trying new things and making your New (School) Year's Resolutions.



This school year, I plan to improve my methods of parent communication.  It is essential to my students' progress to have parents who are invested in encouraging their communication growth.  Development occurs much more slowly when parents are not involved in activities that promote improved speech and language skills.

One method I plan to implement this school year is to provide weekly progress notes to my students' parents.  With a large caseload, this task seems a bit daunting.  However, I have created a few forms to help make this project much less time consuming.  These forms contain text fields and drop-down boxes to help you complete your parent letters in an efficient manner.

The four forms may be downloaded here.  Be sure to open the forms in Word in order to fill in the blank fields.  Once completed, your form will look something like this:

The wonderful thing about this method is that you can email the completed forms to your students' parents if they have access (just another way to save a few trees)!

How do you maintain communication with parents?

Fun With Grammar

Many of my students struggle with the very basic elements of syntax and sentence structure.  To help aid their understanding and use of grammatical forms, I have created several books saturated with visuals targeting discrete areas of grammar development.  Click here to view my adapted book addressing use of pronouns (this, that, these, those).

Ingredients:

1 Printer

1 Hole Punch

2 Binder Rings (1")

Velcro (Optional)

1 Envelope

Directions:

1. Print Having Fun With Pronouns 

2. Use hole punch to create two holes along the left side of each page

3. Using binder rings, attach all pages together (except for the last page)

4. Laminate and cut the last page

5. (optional) attach Velcro to the back of each pronoun visual (this, that, these, those) and in the box of each page

6. Attach (tape) the envelope to the back of your book for pronoun visual storage

7.  Read through the book with your student, using pronoun visuals to aid in understanding and use of the targeted grammatical forms

8. Once your student is successful in formulating sentences using visuals, remove visual support to encourage independent use of targeted grammatical forms

Be on the lookout for additional pronoun and possessive books coming soon.

Dialogic Reading

As a speech-language pathologist, I frequently encourage my students' parents to read with their child often.  I provide specific tips for how to get the most out of their reading experience and often encourage the use of Dialogic Reading techniques to help enhance language development during story time.  Dialogic reading is an evidence-based method used to improve language expression, vocabulary, print awareness, sentence structure, and narrative abilities.

Below is a link to a brochure that I have created outlining the steps of Dialogic reading for parents.

Parent Brochure

Enjoy!

Peer to Peer

Last school year, I teamed up with our school social worker to begin a brand new peer to peer program to help our students with ASD improve their social communication skills.  It was a very powerful and rewarding experience.  We trained ten typically developing 4th and 5th grade students to help enhance their understanding of the challenges faced by students with ASD and provide them with tools to encourage prompting and modeling of appropriate social behaviors.

These student's developed social scripts and created video models to target specific pragmatic skills.  They were incredibly creative and motivated to help enhance the new friendships that they had developed within the group.

Click the link below to view my Prezi describing the research supporting utilization of peer support groups and examples from our group (permission was obtained to include students in this presentation).

Peer to Peer Support Program Prezi

This coming school year, I plan to implement an additional peer group to target improvement of cooperative and symbolic play among our preschool and kindergarten students with ASD.  Have any of you developed a similar program in your school?  What has been your experience?