schmoozeadmin

Summer is vacation time!

On the flip side, summer is a time when many valuable skills gained from the school year are lost. This is a normal phenomenon known as regression. This is why schools should spend the beginning of the school year focusing on the recoupment of skills lost during the months of June, July, and August.

In the therapeutic process we see the influence of regression and recoupment on client progress. Cancelled or missed sessions begin to take their toll. Therefore many speech therapists continue to service their clients during the summer months.

We can’t ignore the fact that everyone else seems to be on vacation. Or that we feel burned out and ready for physical stimulation, exercise, and socialization. Let’s embrace that feeling and incorporate it into our sessions. Allow yourself to enjoy the feeling of summer while continuing to address the goals and objectives to continue to make progress.

Below are some ideas to keep ourselves fresh and cool this summer- in our sessions:

• Work outside: Sit on a picnic bench or on the grass in the shade. Allow the beautiful weather to enhance the work that you are doing with your client. Try not to sit in a distracting location (ie:next to the pool/daycamp house/basketball courts) which can detract from what you are trying to accomplish

•  Incorporate fun summer toys: Buy Kinetic sand and water beads. Allow the client to play with these activities as a reinforcement or as part of the lesson. Beware these items do get messy. Summer’s more laid back so relax and have a 2 minute clean-up time at the end of each session.

•  Summer themes: Center your lessons around summer items and themes. Don’t reinvent the wheel- there are tons of summer themed speech therapy lessons available for Free and for Purchase.

Free Teachers Pay Teachers Summer Downloads

•  Make your sessions somewhat physical: Take a walk,use a ball or jumprope as reinforcement, or draw a modified hopscotch board instead of an overused board game or the ipad.

• Change the routine: Switch something, actually anything around to make this session feel different from the sessions throughout the year.
• Dress for success: Wear something that fits the terrain. If your working in a chilled out camp environment don’t dress to kill and sit uncomfortably. Follow the dress code and dress as casually as possible.
• Learn something new: If your schedule is more laid back take the time to do some research for a puzzling client. Buy a book or get some advice. Learn something new so that you can head back from the summer feeling empowered for the coming year.

Best wishes for an incredible and safe summer!!

Schmoozeadmin

‘Roll- A-Story’ is the game that screams speech therapy!!!.  There are endless options for story creation. However once you sit down to play this game, you realize that it may be too open-ended.  It seems that this game works if you create a structured lesson with the story cubes as an enhancement.  They just don’t make the cut on their own:(.

This story dice set from Junior Learning includes dice for these categories: people, animals, food, places, transport, feelings, weather, actions, sports, objects.

If kids are unfamiliar with the game then it would be important to review all of the pictures to ensure proper understanding.  Then group the dice in groups of 3 or 4 to create stories.  Have the students toss the dice and create a story or sentence from using the pictures on the cubes.  For students with low language skills this can be very challenging as they need more of a scaffold to create a correct sentence.  For high level language students the game can easily get boring and repetitive as they may have difficulty stringing together a cohesive story using unrelated items.

Create structure in your sessions with story cubes:

Take a look at our Story-Cubes Pinterest Boards for materials that will give your session with story cubes some structure. Pinterest: Story Cubes

Don’t wanna spend $$ on story cubes:

Make your own game: Free Teachers Pay Teachers Download

Want to Get super creative?

Create your own dice to play with. Order 144 dice for $20 (comes with self-adhesive labels)

G is for Graduate school.

Researching…networking…applying..waiting..and waiting..and waiting. First I wasn’t sure where I should apply, then I wasn’t sure how to apply, and now that it’s all settled down and I actually have the ability to make some decisions, I’m wondering if I should start all over again and apply somewhere new.

Can I be decisive about anything in my life???

From the beginning…the lucky call came the first day back to work after Pesach. I had just walked in from work and I went straight to wash up so I could get a start on the rest of my day. Then the phone rang. My grandparents were in the kitchen and were available to take the call. (To this day I have no idea why the school didn’t call my cellphone. My family isn’t known for answering the house phone; or checking caller ID for that matter-there’s a reason why I only list my cellphone on important documents). There was a bit of uncertainty in my grandfather’s voice as my legal name is one that he is unfamiliar with. The woman on the phone may have thought I was going through some identity crisis and was unsure of my nameJ (note to self: change your legal first name on your marriage certificateJ) Finally, the moment we had all been waiting for. The graduate school I applied to was pleased to inform me that I was suitable for their program, and I was more than welcome to put down a deposit ASAP.

How to express the feelings going through my mind at that moment?? There was no thought process, it was pure emotion. With tears running down my face I couldn’t even think of calling someone to tell them the news. It was just me and my siddur, thanking Hashem for enabling me to see positive results to all the months of hard work, tight deadlines, and severe stress at times. Finally! Finally I could have a plan for the coming year! Finally I could plan my summer accordingly, and begin looking for a suitable job. Finally I would have an answer to give to all the people who kept asking what my story was for next year. I was on a high for about the next week. I was so relieved to be finished with the decision-making portion of this journey. I had only been accepted to one program and my future was clear. Or so I thought…

Less than a week later, an emails pops into my inbox from a new email address address. The title reads “Announcing our new MS in Speech Language Pathology program”. You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kiddding. Me. I’m supposed to be DONE with this!!! Why should I even consider this when my decision was made? On second thought, this new program had some factors that were high on my priority list. Here I could attend a Jewish program! No worries about explaining yuntif (did I mention that orientation for choice A is on Shavuous?) or clinicals that might be close to Shabbos in the winter. Not to mention the significant price difference.

And so…after asking advice and thinking it through rationally, I came to the realization that it made sense to through myself into the application process once more. If I wanted to do this right, and in the best way possible, I had to put in all my effort into this. Gotta check my resume to update it once more, and adjust my personal statement to meet the requirements set forth by this new program… Here we go again…

During this week’s social skills/speech group we focused on conversation skills. Many special-education students have the ability to make their needs known. However they struggle to master the “fine-art” of conversation and all of it’s nuances.

I found this worksheet on a website called SocialSkillsCentral. It requires a membership fee for premium materials and downloads but I accessed the freebies and found what I needed. This is the worksheet that I used Wksht: Listening during a Conversation. There are 6 scenes involving 2 characters talking to one another. I drew lines around each scene and numbered it from 1-6.

TASK #1: GOOD/BAD conversation

I told my students, some of these conversations are good and some of these conversations are bad. (This use of good/bad is over-simplistic but it enables them to grasp the concept). If we see a good conversation we should draw a check over it and we see a bad conversation we should draw an x over it.

I then role-played each conversation with one of the para-professionals. Students shouted out good/bad and we then all made the appropriate symbol on the paper.

This task was pretty simple for most students, and I utilized it as a warm-up for the next 2 tasks.

TASK #2: Fill in the bubble

I took the same worksheet and used white out on each of the right hand bubbles. The students broke into groups with one teacher/para to assist with brainstorming and writing. They had to fill in the empty speech bubble using the picture and words of the other character as clues.

TASK #3: Fill in the other-bubble

By now students and teachers were groaning but I plowed on. I gave each group the same worksheet but the bubbles on the left side were blank. Once again they filled in the empty bubbles.

Students learned that language is flexible, topic maintenance is critical, and listening required. Mission accomplished:)!

Choose from 4 adorable Critters to race in this oral-motor, face-race game.  Imitate 5 intricate and hysterical faces.  Match your face to the face that you see on the screen.

Target Goals: Oral-Motor

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