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Welcome to another episode of the SLP Now podcast! We’re on week four of our six-week series about planning a month of literacy-based therapy, with units that will meet the needs of your entire school-aged caseload!
For the last four weeks, we’ve used Dr. Ukrainetz’s five step literacy-based therapy framework to work through a month of therapy planning for three units: a play-based early language unit, a picture book, a fiction article, and a non-fiction article.
Today, we’re taking the next step on our therapy planning journey with a month of plans for a science experiment!
This unit is ideal for or students who need a high quality contextualized activity, but may be resistant to using a text. It’s also great for students who are working on social language or problem solving skills because the activities mimic a classroom environment!
Like the literacy-based units we’ve talked about in the past, these activities are incredibly language rich. They can be used to target goals for vocabulary, grammar, syntax, following directions, asking questions, collaborating with peers, and more—even if you’re working with mixed groups.
🔬 Not sure where to start, or which unit best suits your caseload? No problem!
We make general recommendations about which age group to use each unit for, but every caseload is different! That’s why we also created a quick two-minute quiz to help you get started in the right place:
Tell us about your students’ age range and goals, then we’ll send you a list of recommended units + resources based on your caseload needs.
Many SLPs are resistant to the idea of doing science experiments in speech sessions because of the potential material costs or complexity. But we want to encourage you to give it a shot anyway, especially if you’re using the therapy plans inside SLP Now!
For all of our science experiment units, Marisha has done all of the recommended activities in her own speech room or classroom, and recorded herself completing them using simple + inexpensive materials to show how doable they are.
With a bit of confidence, you’ll find these easy—and fun!—to implement.
And if you aren’t able to round up the materials or do the live experiment, you can watch the video with your students, instead. 🙌
Now let’s talk about therapy plans for a science experiment:
🌈 Making a Rainbow
Like the other units we’ve talked about in this series, our science experiment plans are meant to cover four weeks of activities.
However, the five steps we’re going to follow for a science experiment unit are a little different than literacy-based therapy because we aren’t using a text.
Our new unit checklist looks like this:
1. Plan and Prepare
2. Watch and Do
3. Reflect and Troubleshoot
4. Discussion, and
5. Focused Skill Activities
Now let’s dive in to our science experiment unit!
Week one: Plan and prepare
Like pre-story knowledge activation, this step is about figuring out what your students already know, and what kind of knowledge they need to build in order to access the activity.
You can start with a conversation about rainbows, or ask what they expect will happen during the experiment. If there are gaps in knowledge that you want to bridge before diving into the actual experiment, you can use a KWL chart or virtual field trip to help.
💡 Inside the SLP Now membership, we have worksheets for this unit with questions with questions to guide the discussion. Check it out!
Week two: Do the experiment!
This is like reading the book in a literacy-based framework, but it might take a little more time depending on the experiment you choose. 😂
If you physically have the materials, doing the experiment is a great way to incorporate some of those goals related to social language, collaboration, problem-solving, or following directions. But if you don’t have the materials, that doesn’t have to stop you from using the unit! You can always use a video, whether you build a unit around a YouTube video or use one of the videos in SLP Now!
Week three: Reflect and Troubleshoot
This is a great opportunity to ask questions about the experiment, reflect on the process, and discuss ways to apply the learnings to real life. If things didn’t go according to plan, you can practice some problem-solving and brainstorm ways to improve next time!
📝 There’s a worksheet for that! Check out the SLP Now membership for ready-to-go worksheets with questions for reflection and application, to help build comprehension and problem-solving skills.
Week four: Discussion time!
After reflecting on the experiment, it’s time to talk about it. This step gives students a chance to dive into the topic further, encouraging generalization and group discussion.
This is also when you could add in an extension activity, similar to post-story comprehension or creating parallel story. For example, students could draw or write out step-by-step instructions to summarize the experiment, or they could create a mock science television show using a tablet or smartphone camera.
Step five: Focused Skill Activities
At this point, we’re ready to introduce new skills and provide some structured practice. You can target so many goals with this unit, and SLP Now has worksheets to help you do that — whether you’re working on affixes, present/past tense verbs, vocabulary, and more!
🎯 SLP Now has worksheets that you can download or use digitally — and there are suggested activities for each unit that are linked to the target you’re working on!
Hit the easy button and sign up for your free trial today!
Science experiments are a low-key way to get students engaged in language-rich activities, and with fully prepped experiments at your fingertips and activity pages, they require minimal work on your part… just fun!
We’ve got 10 complete science experiment units inside SLP Now, with even more on the way:
🧪 Get your science on!
Just a heads up: That link will only work if you’re signed in to SLP Now.
Not a member yet? Let’s fix that today. You don’t even need a credit card to sign up for your 14-day free trial and let the experimenting begin!
That brings us to the end of our science experiment unit — and we’ll be back at it next week when we wrap up this series with our final episode… therapy plans for a vocational unit!
Links and Additional Resources
- Literacy-based therapy bootcamp
- A month of plans for an early language unit
- A month of plans for a picture book
- A month of plans for a fiction article
- A month of plans for a non-fiction article
- Get Spring therapy plan recommendations for your caseload
At SLP Now, we are hard workers… but we also like to work smarter.
That means we’re constantly improving our materials, therapy planning resources, and the ways we support SLPs like YOU — so you can skip the hard work part and just work smarter. 👇
Inside the SLP Now membership, you’ll find 400+ therapy plans and an organized library of 4,500+ (and counting!) evidence-backed speech therapy materials to help you differentiate your therapy in a matter of minutes.
We analyzed the books, identified the targets, and created unit plan pages that suggest activities based on the skills you’re targeting and your students’ needs!
This is a one stop shop for all your literacy-based therapy needs, including resources for virtual field trips and visuals to help those concepts stick.
You can sign up for a two week trial that is risk-free and free-free → We won’t even ask for your credit card so there’s no worry about an unexpected subscription! All you have to do is click! 🥳
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Transcript
00:00
Hello there, and welcome to the SLP now podcast, where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode.
00:19
This week we are diving into a science experiment unit. So this is part of a six week series where I've been sharing month long therapy units for different age ranges. And the previous units were using picture books and articles, and they were much more literacy based. But like I said, this week is a science experiment, so it's a little bit different. And this unit is ideal for students who are maybe a little bit resistant to using a text, and you need another high quality, contextualized activity. I think this is a really great break for students, and it's still an amazing way to target any of their goals. And I think it's also a really amazing context for students who are working on social language or, like collaborating with peers or more problem solving those types of goals.
01:28
This is a really nice, hands on context to target those goals, and it mimics what they would be doing in the classroom as well, in a different way than an article would. So this type of unit is really nice for those types of students and groups. And if you are having trouble deciding which of these units are ideal for your caseload, check out the show notes@slpnow.com. Again, that's slpnow.com 187. That'll be a link to the show notes, that which will include all of the resources that I mentioned today. But you'll also find a link to a two minute quiz, which you'll enter a few quick details about your caseload. And then we'll generate a therapy plan for you based on the details that.
02:25
You share with us.
02:27
And so that'll give you a really great starting point. And then you can listen back to these episodes for some extra tips for the units that you want to use with your caseload. So now, without further ado, let's dive into the actual unit. So this science experiment is called making a rainbow, and it's broken into four weeks of activities. So just like the other units, it's meant to cover a month of therapy, just a little bit of context if you're not familiar with therapy plans inside SLP. Now, for our science experiment units, I recorded myself completing a number of different experiments, and all of the experiments are using really simple, inexpensive materials, so they are easy to implement.
03:23
They're all experiments that I've done in my speech room or in classrooms, so they are absolutely easily implementable if that's a word, and the material should be easy to grab. But I also recorded a video of the experiments, so you could, instead of gathering all of the supplies, you also have the option to use the video that we've created and complete the activities in conjunction with the video instead of the hands on experiment. So both options are completely doable. So it is what it is, and then just a quick overview of what the unit looks like. In week one, it's really focused on planning and preparing. And then in week two is when, whether or not you have the supplies to do the experiment, I encourage them watching the video.
04:25
There are some really great opportunities for language and problem solving within that, and then they can actually do the experiment. And then in week three, there are some activities around reflection and troubleshooting. And then in week four, there's a more overall discussion of the experiment. And for all of these weeks, we have activity pages that will guide you through the unit in like, guiding the planning phase. And this is all very language rich. So like I said at the beginning, this is great for facilitating collaboration between peers and problem solving. But all of these activities are also language rich, so we can still target them for or use these activities to target goals like syntax and vocabulary and whatever goals we might be writing at this age range.
05:25
So yeah, there's different resources again, and activity pages that you can use to walk through that experiment. And I don't think it'd be helpful to read out the questions necessarily. But you are welcome to check out this therapy plan. It's totally free to check it out. So if you're already an SLP now member, just go to therapy plans tab and type in rainbow and then it'll show you the experiment. And then if you aren't a member yet, head to slP now.com unit. All you do is enter your name and email and a quick password. We won't ask for your credit card or anything like that, but then that'll give you access to the free trial where you can browse all of our therapy plans.
06:18
You can also check out the science experiment unit for making a rainbow and kind of scroll through the different activities and resources there. But that is an overview of how I would use a science experiment with my students. Let me know if you have any questions. I'd love to see you on Instagram if you want to send me a DM. Let me know how this unit went, or if you have any questions or ideas, I'd love to hear from you. And yeah, that's a wrap on this week, and I hope you love the science experiment.
06:55
Thanks for listening to the SLP now podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your SLP friends. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast to get the latest episodes sent directly to you.
07:07
You see you next time.
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