Introducing our new resident Speech Therapist, CC from If I Only Had Super Powers You’ll find ideas and tips here every other Saturday at 5 Minutes For Special Needs.
I am extremely excited and somewhat nervous to be writing for the great readers of 5 Minutes for Special Needs. Let me introduce myself. My name is CC and I am a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP). I attended an Ivy League college and received my Bachelors in Biology. After teaching science for one year, I went back to graduate school to get my Masters in Speech Language Pathology. I have worked in a pediatric rehab hospital, private practice, hospital based clinic, Augmentative Communication clinic, and middle school. Most of my career, however, has been working with elementary aged students within a low income public school setting. I amusingly admit to people that I had no idea what Speech Therapy was when I entered graduate school. I applied because my father had survived a stroke when I was in college and had years of speech therapy. My mother thought I would like this profession. Fortunately, I ended up loving my accidental career!
I was asked to provide some speech therapy ideas for parents, so I want to share one of my favorites: Have your child practice talking about personal events. So much of communication is sharing ideas and events with others so that we can feel connected and relay important information. The weekend’s events are a great place to start since many teachers ask on Monday morning, “What did you do this weekend?” This task works on many language goals including: pronoun usage, past tense verbs, descriptions, social skills, eye contact, sequencing, and memory. I will break the activity into several levels depending on your child’s language skills.
Children who are highly verbal:
* Ask your child what they did on Saturday.
* List or draw pictures of all the activities. What they ate, who they saw, what they watched.
* Repeat this activity for Sunday.
* Have the child retell the events in their own words using pronouns, past tense verbs, and detailed descriptions.
* A child working on social skills can use this as a script for a conversation with their teacher.
* Practice several times.
* Let the teacher know what you have been practicing and that you will be sending the list/pictures into school for the teacher to use as prompts (from a teacher’s perspective it is extremely frustrating to ask a child about their weekend and have them say “I don’t know.”!).
Children working on articulation:
* Follow the advice above, expect concentrate on the child using their targeted speech sounds. For example, if your child is working on /k, g/ sounds, they need to be highly aware of those sounds in their conversation and make sure to produce them correctly when talking about the weekend.
Children with limited verbal skills or nonverbal:
* Use picture prompts (such as the image below) to help your child circle the weekend’s events.
* Try saying these activities verbally, with sign or with other forms of Augmentative Communication.
* If they are able, use multiple prompts to help the child produce 3+ word sentences such as “I ate pizza. I watched movie.”
* If the child is non-verbal, encourage them to point to the circle pictures when asked about their weekend and prompt the child if necessary.
* Practice several times.
* Let the teacher know what you have been practicing and that you will be sending the list/pictures into school for the teacher to use as prompts. Hold the child accountable to “using their words”.
I hope that you will find this to be a useful activity that most families can use at home and at school. Help your child become a master of communication. Please contact me with questions or ideas for future posts here at 5 Minutes for Special Needs.
Happy Talking!
CC