Speech

This all-wooden game gets kids ages 3+ very excited to play.  Target memory and color skills or use this game as a reinforcer during sessions.  It can also be used to teach verb tense and pronouns (“my frog is hopping, your frog hopped.”  The best part is that the kids can set it up all by themselves:) pillen-pharm.com/.

Research Round-up:

“Intervention May Improve Follow-up Rates for Newborns with Hearing Loss.”

Although newborn hearing screenings are performed routinely at hospitals across the US, there are difficulties following up with all of these parents/babies.  A new study from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center found that by working with WIC  they could improve the effectiveness of new-born hearing screening programs for low-income mothers and their babies.In this study the rate of eligible two year old infants lost to follow-up was 9.6% compared to 28.7% of infants from the same hospitals but not WIC eligible.”

“Boy’s Early Childhood Behavioral Problems Associated with Less Academic Success.”

A new study aims to understand why boys with early childhood behavioral difficulties were less likely to complete college than girls with the same behavioral issues.  The study reveals that the manner in which the school responds to the behavior plays a role in shaping future behaviors.  She found that the behavior of boys is likely to be generalized and stereotyped causing educators to dole out harsher punishments to them.

On The Job

Barbara J. Ehren, a school based SLP talks about the misnomer of “push-in” therapy.  She says when she hears this term “She envisions an SLP barging into a teachers classroom, perhaps knocking over classroom furniture or even a few students in the process…” Ehren says these services should be simply referred to as “in-class services”.  Changing the name of the therapy would be reflective of a change in mindset as well.  Push-in or in-class services are only useful and effective when they correlate with the classroom lesson and enhance the learning that is currently in progress.  Otherwise, being in the classroom serves a terrible distraction and diminishes from the session.  Aggressive push-in therapy is loose loose- student and classroom students loose.  Gentler go-in therapy is Win-Win for all parties involved.  It’s all about the semantics!

Below are some excerpts and hi-lights from the August edition of The ASHA Leader:

-The ASHA convention will be in Philadelphia from November 17-November 19. (That’s pretty close to Lakewood:)

Click here to see the fee schedule

–Sensory Stories for People with Disabilities– this is an activity that is most appropriate for  multiply impaired students or preschool age students.  The author, Kim Patterson suggests pairing sensory experiences with a story.  She gives an example using a simple farm story.  She uses a spritz bottle, a bungee cord, hay , wood, animal sound recordings, dry leaves, pumpkin, and cider to go along with the story.  She writes “each line (or couple of lines) and a photo depicting the text- go on a laminated card.  As you read each card with the student or client,the student experiences the sensory stimulus.” While reading about rain she may spritz the hand of the student and while reading about a hay ride the student would feel the scratchy texture of hay.  Creating these story experiences take time and effort. Take a look at www.bagbooks.org for some (expensive) ready-made examples.

-A speech therapist writes in about her work as a low-incidence specialist in schools.  She concludes “though SLP’s all receive the same basic curricula in graduate school, we develop different proficiencies through internships, fellowships, and various work settings.  Forming professional relationships across these different proficiencies and settings can benefit everyone involved.” We have all experienced the need to reach out to a colleague for practical advice on client interventions.  Theraschmooze.com aims to provide the framework for collaboration within the frum community.

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)