Hey there. Today we are going to be diving in to all things basic concepts. I nerded out on all of the research, and I'm really excited to share the awesome studies that I came across, and the tips, and tricks, and strategies that will fully help you tackle these goals with confidence with your students.

So we're going to start out with a more traditional format of the presentation, and then we are going to dive in to some practical demonstrations and examples, I'll show you different materials that I use, and how I set up my lessons and all of that good stuff. So it's going to get super practical, super quick, and even these research components I think are really helpful, because it helps kind of give us a framework so that we can be more effective with our problem solving, and all of these different components as we're diving into these lessons with our students. And it'll just make the practical stuff make that much more sense.

So here we go. So why vocabulary? And this will apply to anything that we do with vocabulary, basic concepts falls under that category. But there's a lot of research around vocabulary being a preeminent predictor of success in learning to read, and that was by the National Reading Panel in 2000. And there's also a really nice quote that I like, "The number of words in a child's vocabulary is an indicator of his or her linguistic health, and a factor in his or her ability to use language in varied contexts and for multiple purposes." So that was in an article by Rich [Gells 00:02:02] in 2004, and I'll link to all of the articles in the notes.

But it's just, it's such a powerful tool, and I've seen it make a huge impact, just pre-teaching some vocabulary before we dive into a unit has made a huge different in terms of comprehension, I've seen just a little bit of intervention make huge impact on comprehension. And then, especially related to basic concepts, we can get a little more specific now. Basic concepts are a really important component in a lot of academic tasks. And there are tons of studies citing the importance of basic concepts for academic achievement, and I'll list some of those in the notes, but they're a huge part.

If you think about it, a lot of the basic concepts, there are quantitative, temporal, that are going to be a huge component of any math types of tasks, especially in the earlier grade, and then they just build upon those in the later grades. Kindergarten and early elementary teachers use basic concepts terms with great frequency, according to Bowman, 1986, when giving directions. They're just a huge part of the school day, they're a huge part of the instruction, and then future academic tasks as well. And math I think is just a really clear example. If you look at a lot of the early math activities, they're all based on basic concepts essentially, so it's by teaching our students these concepts we give them a huge leg up, or at least help them be able to keep up a little bit better, because they're of really high utility for our kiddos.

And then, in terms of the development, Bracken, this study is a little old, it was done in 1988, but they evaluated over 1,000 children ages three to seven, and they looked at the rate and sequence of basic concept development, so they looked at 49 pairs, and we'll go in to a couple of examples of the different pairs, but they talk about ... they have positive poles and negative poles, and they found that, because they concept pairs weren't developed at the same time, or acquired at the same time, there was the positive pole, in 70% of cases the positive pole was acquired prior to the negative pole, which can be really interesting. And I couldn't find a good study saying whether we want to target, do we have to have the positive pole to have the negative one? And I don't think that's the case, because 30% of the pairs the negative pole was acquired first.

But I wonder, it'd be really interesting to see, okay, so if I target the positive one first does that help the student get the negative one more quickly, or does teaching the negative one help them get the positive? That would be super interesting. But if we're just going off of the development approach we could use that to help us structure therapy and teach the positive pole first, but that's if we're taking a development approach, and there could be different strategies behind that. But I think that's super interesting.

So to give some examples, so if we're looking at size, big is one of the earliest developing concepts, and then we have big, and little is the negative pole. So big, I think of it as big has a lot of size, and little doesn't have a lot of size. And some of them don't quite make sense, like there's male and female ones, they put the male/boy in the positive, and girl in the negative, and I'm not quite sure why that is, but that's interesting.

And then, so one other example is full and empty. Full is the positive one, because it has lots of ... it's full, it has lots of quantity, and empty is the negative pole because it's lacking quantity. And then happy is the positive pole for sad. And the development, I can share this in the notes as well, but you can see the development of the concepts over time, and we start with a lot of qualitative concepts in the beginning, and we gradually add in more positional concepts. And in general, of course there are some exceptions, but in general we start seeing the quantitative and temporal concepts develop a little bit later. But like I said, you should check out the chart in more detail to be able to see exactly which concepts develop when. But I think it's really important to know the development of this.

And the tricky part is there are a lot of different concepts. So we said there's 49 poles, which means that there are almost 100 different concepts that we might be teaching. Which is a lot to keep track of, so let's dive in to some strategies on figuring out how to make this assessment work. So there are some formal measures, like the Bone Test of Basic Concepts, they also have the Bracken Basic Concepts Scale. So that one looks at receptive and expressive identification, so we would, a lot of times it's pretty easy to find perceptive tasks for this, where you have them ... And it's just easier to do it this way, so you give them a field of pictures, and then you say, "Show me the big one, show me the little one," and you just go through that, and it's pretty easy to assess that.

When we're looking at expressive use of the concepts it's a little bit tricky. I mean we can totally do it, it just involves a lot of the times, you can try and do it with objects, or you can use the same picture items and you can ask them, "What size is this one?" And they could tell you small of big, but it's just a little bit trickier because it's open ended, as you can imagine, because it's all relative. So they might think it's big, so it's just a little bit tricky.

And maybe if you have a field of pictures, so if you have a small circle, a medium size circle, and a big circle you could have them point to the one, "What size is this circle? What size is that circle?" And that's a way around that, so you can use, if you're having a hard time finding the expressive assessment you can use any of the receptive items and just have them tell you those words.You can also use different items. So having a ball and ask, "Oh, where's the ball?" And that works really well for the location concepts, or the locative concepts. And then, yeah, so we can kind of get creative with how we do that. But the Bracken Basic Concepts Scale has that built in.

I also alluded to this a little bit, but we can use informal play-based assessments, so you can try and set up a play-based situation where the student has to identify the concepts as you're engaging in different play activities, and then also use the concepts expressively. One tool that I particularly enjoy is Smarty Ears Basic Concept Skill Screener. And this one is only receptive, but I pull it up, and it's an app that I purchased, but I just open it up on my tablet, and it's really simple, but the students ... I always worry because there's quite a few items, because there's so many concepts to assess, and I always am like, "Oh, are they going to be okay?", but every student has totally stuck with it, even the ones that I thought might not be able to handle it.

But it's really cool, because they have a pre-recorded voice, so you could just leave the student to do this on their own, but I typically sit by the student and go through it with them, without giving support of course, other than behavior management. But it's really cool because they have a field of four pictures, and then the voice says, "Point to the big animal, point to the small animal," and it just goes through all of the different concepts on the list. They also use the same, they use that study to determine which concepts they include in the screener, which is really helpful. And then they, at the end you get this really cool report. So it scores the entire screener, but then it also gives you information about the developmental sequence, so how many of the three-year old concepts do they have, the four, the five, and then they also tell you which types of concepts they're missing, which is often interesting.

So do they have a good mastery of qualitative concepts and they're really struggling with quantitative concepts? And that, it's just a beautiful overview, and it really helps, it makes it easier to identify which targets we might want to start with, and it's just a really easy tool and it looks really good in a report as well. I just like how that's all organized, and that really helps drive my treatment, because it helps me identify which concepts I might want to target, so that's a really awesome tool that we use.

And now we'll talk about some of the different strategies that we can use when we actually go into therapy. And a lot of the ideas that I came up with were based on a study by Cipher and Schwartz, 1991, and this particular study was a really interesting setup, where they used circle time in a preschool to introduce basic concepts, and to have some instruction around basic concepts.

So this is something that I was able to implement in one of my preschools, and I think it's something that we can ... if we are able to push into the classroom it can be a really great activity, especially in preschool. And it might still be helpful in kindergarten as well, depending on the levels of the students and all of that. But it's really cool to see how they set things up, and I've seen it work really well. But if you aren't able to go into the classroom I think it would still apply nicely to a group of students just in your speech room, you could use the same model. And ideally most of the students would be working on the concepts, but we get to get creative with our mixed groups, eh?

So sometimes, if that's the case I would just find some ways to incorporate the different types of targets into this instruction model. And if you have any specific examples and you're wondering about how to make that happen, definitely let me know. And then in some cases it might make more sense to do this individually, like I said it really depends on the dynamics of your group, and your caseload, and all of that good stuff.

But the model that they set up is, so you go into the classroom and you do 15 minutes of direct instruction, and I'll talk a little bit about what that looks like, and then you do 15 minutes of interactive instruction. And using this framework the students obviously learned more of the basic concepts, so they had some nice results around that. And I don't think they looked a lot at generalization or anything like that, and the study was done quite a while ago too, so it's something we definitely want to keep our eyes peeled for, to see if we can find any other evidence around it. But I've seen, I really liked how they set this up, and it incorporates some of the principles that I saw in the other research.

So, just to recap they do 30 minutes of instruction, 15 is direct, 15 is interactive. And then, because they're doing this in the classroom the teachers saw what was happening, they got ideas from observing the direct and the interactive pieces, and then they were instructed to use the concepts throughout the week. So if they're working on big and small, during snack time they might say, "Oh, you got a big grape, you got a small grape," if the concept is big or small. And they would just emphasize that throughout the week, using whichever concepts they identified.

And so, with direct instruction they spent, so they picked two concepts to target during that time. So it's essentially seven-and-a-half minutes for each concept. And they gave the students multiple examples of the concepts in a dynamic presentation, so they had different objects [inaudible 00:17:08] boards and a chalkboard, and they showed a lot of different positive and negative examples of each concept. So, for example with big they say, "Oh, this one is big, this one is big, this one is not big."

And then after that initial instruction the students were given examples of the concept, and then they would be asked to ... So if I was working on the concept big I would ask, "Is this big?", and I would show the students a picture, and then they would have to say yes or no. And this works well in a classroom setting, because then you can get an idea of who needs additional support, and who's getting it. You can also use gestures, or you can even have a little visual of yes versus no, and it really depends on the level of the preschool but I think thumbs up and thumbs down would work well too.

So then that's a way to test and see how the students are doing. If you have a assistant in the room, or the teacher is supporting you you can use that to take data too. And I know there's some cool tech out there too, that it might be a little bit much for preschool, but there's some cool tools out there where you can just snap a picture of the classroom and they just have to be holding up a certain sign. But that might be more appropriate for older students, because I think that might get tricky with preschoolers with language delays, but you never know.

So they would just continue that. And it really depends on the feedback, if a lot of students aren't understanding the concept then you keep giving examples. So you give examples, and then you quiz. Examples, quiz, example, quiz. And then if you notice that certain kids aren't answering with the group then you call on them and ask them to respond. And it's really cool to kind of see that happening, and it's a really nice way to structure that. And I personally just created some, I don't bring in all of the objects because that would be a lot to keep track of, I just have some no-print resources and I just pull them up on ... I'll do it on the iPad if I don't have access to a projector, but a lot of times in a classroom there will be a projector, and that's a really nice way to present that without any prep, all the concepts are in one thing and it's super easy, I love it.

And then for the second half of the circle time activity they do interactive instruction. So we just talked about, so in this 30 minute class lesson the first 15 minutes are spent giving examples of two target concepts, and then having students answer questions about the concept in a yes or no format, just quizzing. And then they move between the different types of instruction, like demonstration and questioning, depending on how the students are doing, and then they would move to the next concept and do the same thing.

And then we jump into interactive instruction. So then they choose one of the weekly concepts, and they do the first one during the first session, and then the second one during the second session, so they alternate, because they were doing this twice a week. Which I think is, that's a typical treatment time, right? So we do 30 minutes twice a week, I guess it's different for every student, but I think that's a fairly typical model. So this could be put in to our regular therapy sessions, or we could do a modified version if we see the students less frequently.

But then during the interactive piece of the instruction they set up the environment so that they student had plenty of opportunities to use the concept in the classroom. So they did this using different art, drama, games, and again, they found activities designed to incorporate that concept. And so then they had multiple, because this is a whole classroom, so they had multiple teachers, and they were providing indirect instruction by commenting on what the student was doing. So if they're doing a drawing activity, and again we're working on the concept big you can say, "Oh, that's a big marker, oh you just drew a big circle." Or if they're doing drama, or if they're doing a pretend play activity, "Oh, you picked the big shoes," or, "You got a big basket," and just indirect instruction of the concept, and just kind of narrating what they're doing in purposeful activities.

So one example that they gave in the article, they were working on the concept farthest, and they divided the children into groups and put them in lines, and then each child was given a different colored beanbag, and the students took turns throwing the bag as far as possible. So I love how they incorporated movement, that's super fun. And then they kept going down the line until everyone had an opportunity to toss the beanbag, and then the children were then asked to tell which beanbag was thrown the farthest, and you continue to grow through and pick up the beanbag.

And so the students would circle through the line, so Student One, after all the students threw the beanbag then Student One would be at the front again, and then he was asked, "Which one went the farthest?", and then he would have to go walk and get the farthest beanbag and pick it up, and then he'd go to the end of the line. Then the next student would be asked, "Which one went the farthest?" And then he would say, "The blue one went the farthest," and then he would go get the beanbag, and go to the end of the line. Then the next student would be asked, "Which beanbag went the farthest?" And then she would go pick up the beanbag that was the farthest at that time, and then everyone has a chance to say which one is the farthest. And I guess it wouldn't be correct to say, "Which one went the farthest?", we would just say, "Which one is the farthest away?", for example.

But that's really amazing, because it's a type of activity where they all get exposure to the concept, and they all get an opportunity to practice it, and then the see their peers practicing it too. And there's some excitement too, because they know which color beanbag they had and they're like, "Oh, yay!" So they're excited to see which one went the farthest. So I just love that idea.

And I created some different materials that have different, if there's sheets for the different concepts that include ideas, activity ideas, and they also include ... they can also be sent home to the parents. So they're editable pieces, which we'll dive into more in the videos for the different sections, but it includes ideas for you, and then you can also edit that and print it out, so that parents know what we did and then they can have ideas to target that at home too. So that resource combines the interactive ideas, as well as the way to implement the incidental instruction. So this can be sent to parents or teachers, depending on what setting you're in.

But that's just to give some examples of the incidental instruction, like I said before this happens throughout the week, and then the teachers were provided with a list of target concepts, and they were told to use them naturally, and just to reinforce and generalize those concepts. So for an example that they gave in the study, the concept left, like, L-E-F-T, was a target. And then during a classroom art activity the teacher said, "Yes, that's right, you painted only on the left side, I like the dots you painted on the left side. Look, all your paint is on the left." And so they're using that to comment on what the students are doing, and they are using that as an opportunity for incidental instruction, just throughout the week.

And this could also apply to parents, maybe having multiple concepts would be a little challenging for them, but we can have, maybe work on one concept at a time and just encourage the parents to work on that concept, practice it at home, maybe even keep track of how many times they used it, and I think with some initial explanation of why we want to do that, I think that's a really powerful model that gives us a lot of bang for our buck.

So I really like this framework of making sure that we teach the concept first, giving examples of the concept, and then having the students asking questions to ensure understanding. So how I do this is I have a no-print activity that just has different pictures on it, and then it prompts me through the different steps, so I know which target I'm targeting, and then I have the visuals for the direct instruction as well as the ... teaching the concept, as well as checking for understanding. So I can say, "Oh, this one is big, this one is not big," and then I can ask, "Is this one big?", and then they say yes or no.

And that's that direct instruction piece, then the interactive instruction is just having some embedded activities. And this could work really well in a mixed group. If you have one student working on basic concepts, one student working on grammar, and another student working on ... what's another good skill for preschool? Working on categories, you can use that in interactive instruction. So no matter what you're doing, you could even be reading a book, and you can talk about, "Oh, that one is big, that one is not big," and you can go through it. And you can kind of shift between the student's different goals, and it's totally do-able, you can totally make this happen. But I really liked how this study broke it down for us, and gave some really practical tips.

Okay, and then just one thing to keep in mind as a potential modification. This was a study done with Head Start students, and there's some research that came out more recently that shows that we might want to limit the variety of objects that we use to show what a concept means. So this was done, and this was an article from the Informed SLP I believe, it was done Nicholas, et al, 2019. But if we're working with students who have low overall language or receptive vocabulary skills, this would apply if we're working on basic concepts, trying to show the meaning of a preposition, because a lot of ... I kind of extended this, because a lot of times prepositions are basic concepts, a lot of prepositions are on the list, and trying to show the meaning of those words with a bunch of different words and objects may be confusing or distracting to students.

So we might want to limit the variety of objects that we use to show what it means, so instead of pulling ... if we're working on "on", instead of showing an apple on a table, and a book on a chair, and a bag on a bed, and having a bunch of different objects, we might want to keep things consistent, and maybe just have a table, and only use a few different objects, versus having a lot of variation. So we might just want to keep it a little bit simpler when we're doing that initial teaching. And so that's one thing to keep in mind, and just a potential modification that I saw.

And it's interesting, because there's a lot of different research. There was one study by Snape and [Crat 00:30:47] in 2018, and what they did this with four to five year olds who had specific language impairment, and they showed that increased variability helped with nouns, so that's interesting and it's kind of contradictory, so I just wanted to point this out, because if you're feeling like your students aren't making the progress that you would expect you might try limiting the variety of objects. Or, if you're starting with a really simple approach, and you're finding that it's not generalizing or anything like that then maybe you do want to increase variety.

But Snape and Crat published another study in 2018, and they found that showing two different versions of verbs simultaneously also helped. So that's showing two different pictures at the same time, so there's not a direct parallel, I think that the Nicholas et al article most closely parallels what we're talking about now, because teaching nouns and verbs is a little bit different, but it's just really interesting to think about the variability, and using that as a troubleshooting step to decide what we want to do, and where we want to go with that.

Okay, and then one other potential modification. There was a study that was really helpful about using iconic gestures, so it looks like what it means. So if you're working on the basic concept "on", you might put your hand, one hand flat, and then a fist, and put your ... and I wish you could see this, because I don't know how well I'm describing it, but have a flat hand and then take a fist and put it on your hand. So that could be an iconic gesture for on, and "under" you would just put it under your hand. And they found that that gesture helps three to four year olds learn new words.

And they did this with nouns and verbs, but I don't see why it wouldn't apply to prepositions, and so that's a strategy that you might try, especially if students are struggling with it, you might pair some gestures with the different concepts. Like if you're doing "far" you can point really far, and then "close" you can put your hands really close to your body, or "near", so I think a lot of the basic concepts are very imageable, and we could easily incorporate the use of some iconic gestures.

And just in case I didn't clarify, iconic gestures look like what they mean. So, for example, "on" looks like on. Or, for example, with the verb example, if you move your arms like you're running then that means it's iconic, because it shows what it means. You want it to mean running and that what you're doing. And so they found that nonrepresentational gestures weren't as helpful, this was by ... Oh, I'm totally going to butcher these names, but Vogt and Kashki, in 2017. Just look for V-O-G-T in the notes so that you get that appropriate reference.

And just, in case you're curious, when they were teaching nouns they alluded to the shape of the object, so for example if they were teaching deer they would make horns to allude to the shape of the noun. And then for the verbs they indicated the manner or path of action, so for the verb creep they made slow, tiptoe motions with their hands to represent the word creep, which I think that's a really good way to teach that verb, that's perfect because you can just picture it. So that can be another tool in our tool belt to help us target basic concepts with our students.

And then again there was a study by Magrin et al in 1981 that talks about incorporating movement, and that's why I really like the idea of using some of those iconic gestures, because it keeps students engaged, it gets them moving a little bit. And if you don't want to use the gestures you can get them, as you're teaching the concepts, you can have them move. So if you're working on "on" you can help them put their hand, or their foot, or whatever on the chair, or under the chair, and you can have them move with those positional concepts. And you can get some interaction with the different types of concepts.

And I mentioned this before, but some of my favorite activities, especially with the younger students I love using play. There's some really great activities that we can use there, we'll dive into a couple ideas now, and then we'll do more demonstration of those later. Books are amazing, and that'll also be included in the demonstration piece. And we gave some examples of this already, but crafts are a really fun way to work on different concepts, because especially if you're doing a drawing type of thing, there's lots of positional concepts included in there, there's lots of qualitative describing concepts that we can use, we can also use the ... it's just a great activity. It's a great way to work on all of those different concepts, and it's easy to manipulate and have the students kind of experience those concepts.

I also love scavenger hunts, it's a way that I am able to incorporate movement and then have students practice the different concepts. So we'll get up and move around the room, and go on a scavenger hunt for the different concepts, and it's just a really great way, if they're getting a little bit squirrely during some of the instruction pieces we'll switch over. And I think it's also a nice carryover tool.

So for some different play activity ideas, and like I said we'll dive into this more later, but containers are perfect for play, like boxes and buckets. You can work on qualitative concepts, quantitative concepts, locative concepts. So you can do whether it's deep or shallow, full or empty, which one has more or less, which one is inside or outside, so tons and tons of options there. With a dollhouse it's a great way to work on the people concepts, like boy/girl, brother/sister, it's also perfect for locative concepts like in and out, inside/outside. And these are just quick examples, we can get creative and make pretty much any concept work for any activity. We just want to think about it a little bit, some concepts won't make as much sense for all activities, so you just want to think about it ahead of time.

But I also love pretend food activities, those are great for quantitative and qualitative concepts. I love doing, I love the Toca Boca apps, which incorporate technology and the pretend food, but I also have a bunch of felt food that I got from the Dollar Spot, that's really fun to work on different concepts. And then wind-up toys are really fun, because students are super interested and engaged with those.

And yeah, so I mentioned this Toca Boca app when I talked about food, but they also have a pet one which is really fun, they have a doctor app, they have one where you feed monsters, where you have a tea party, there's so many options and I love that they're all really simple, and it's easy to manipulate things and set it up in a way where the student is supposed to use the concept, or I'm at least able to model the concept well.

Oh, and another one that I really like, since we're talking apps, is Cookie Doodle. And I think that's a paid one too, but I really like it because the student has ... there's lots of concepts involved in actually making the cookie, so they add all of the ingredients, and they mix the ingredients, which concepts galore in there, it's amazing. And then they also decorate the cookie, and they have a ton of different decorating tools and it's really easy to work on a variety of concepts there, so that is super fun.

Then one other study that I came across, by Lund et al in 2019, and this one was also reviewed by the Informed SLP, it's amazing because she reviews all of the most recent practical articles, so she helps kind of narrow down the search a little bit, and helps me find the really good articles, which is amazing. But they talked about co-trading in PE, which is amazing because it helps incorporate movement, and it's super engaging and fun, and it incorporates some of the principles that we talked about. And they targeted five different concept words, and they compared that to the SLP targeting it by herself or himself, the adopted PE teacher by him or herself, and then both of them together in co-treatment.

And they did this in 30 minute, large group lessons, and they did this four days a week for nine weeks. So there was a lot of, a high frequency of concept words. And the results were that, out of 10 children, four learned more concepts in co-treatment weeks compared to weeks when the SLP or the PE teacher worked alone. So that was really interesting, that being able to collaborate in that way and co-treat with a PE teacher, that's pretty fun, so that's just another clever idea to implement this and make it practical and relevant for our students, and potentially get more bang for our buck. And then you don't have to pull them out from one of their favorite classes, which is cool.

So that's all that we have for today. Again, be sure to check out the videos to see more of the demonstration pieces of how we might start targeting these concepts, and make this happen for our students. And definitely let me know if you have any questions, and we'll see you next week.

If you'd like to see the demonstration videos that I mentioned head to SLPNow.com/nine, again that's SLPNow.com/nine, that's also where you can find the list of articles mentioned, as well as any other resources. And you can also find the link to the SpeechTherapyPD.com course if you are a Speech Therapy member you can get [Asher 00:42:58] credits for unlimited courses, or if you'd like to sign up just for this course you have the option to do that. And the cool part is that you'll get credits for listening to this podcast, and getting some practical ideas for your therapy session, and they're an Asher Approved CEU provider, so these courses will show up on your transcript. So you can't get any better than that, hope to see you next week, and thanks again.