Hey there. Today we are chatting about strategies that we can use when targeting basic concepts. So these small but meaningful words like ""on under before"" are the foundation for understanding classroom directions, understanding stories. They're embedded in the curriculum, especially when it comes to math.

We are going to be reviewing some practical evidence-backed strategies that we can useand then we're going to tie it all together with a book, Zoe Gets Ready. So we'll talk about how we can embed this into our literacy based therapy units. First up we have a few strategies that we can use when breaking down concepts for students.

I'll share all the citations in the show notes, but one strategy involves keeping it clear in focus and working on one concept at a time,making sure that a student masters a concept before we add in more concepts. And this helps reduce confusion, especially for, students with language delays.

If we have vocabulary goals, it might make sense, to keep our instruction more focused for these students. There's a study by Seifert and Schwartz, 1991,and they inspired how I set up all of our basic concepts units in SLP Now. They talk about combining direct instruction, with interactive and incidental teaching.

And they did this with preschoolers and found that this direct instruction plus embedded practice, resulted in meaningful gains in preschoolers' understanding of basic concepts. We get really good results when we do that explicit teaching and then give students the opportunity to practice and see these concepts in action in meaningful contexts, like when reading a story or during play or during their routines.

and like I said, I'll share that research study in the show notes. It's a great practical read. All of the basic concepts unitsin SLP Now help implement the evidence back strategies for that direct instruction, and then when it comes to embedding concepts in meaningful context, we don't want to just drill. As we're reading stories, we can emphasize the concepts in the reading and through all of our literacy based therapy activities like our virtual field trip, for example.

And then if we're doing play-based activities, our early language books include tons of play-based activities, and we can practice our concepts and model and recast them during our play and routines as well. There's a lot of ways that we can embed those.

Then strategy three is interesting and nuanced depending on our student, but, we want to use multiple exemplars, but we want to be strategic with how we're doing that. We want to expose students to the concept. Let's say our focus for our next therapy session is on the basic concept.

We want to expose students to that concept in different contexts. whether it's play-based or during their daily routines. and with different items. So put the apple on the table, put the toy on the floor.However, Nicholas et al 2019, suggests limiting the variety of objects early on. And so this kind of goes along with that, starting with direct instruction. So maybe this is a way to kind of reconcile that research. So when we are doing our direct instruction, we wanna just have a few exemplars. Start really simple and then expand as students start to understand the concept, keeping it consistent at first. And the activities in SLP Now help you do that, so that's great. And then the fourth strategy is to pair verbal labels with iconic gestures or visuals. We can use gestures that look like what they mean. For the example with on, we can hold up our fist and put the other hand on the fist. That could be our iconic gesture for on, or put our hand under our fist for under.

Or like spreading our hands apart for big, or just sitting with a little pinch for little. We can use those gestures or icon cards to represent the concept. There is the Vogt & Kauschke, sorry if I butcher any of these names from 2017, is the study that talks about iconic gestures supporting concept learning.

We can use those gestures or other visuals to help support students. Keeping that gesture or icon consistent can help with understanding.

And our fifth strategy is to collaborate when you can.

A study by Lund et al in 2019 found that students learn more concepts when an SLP collaborated with the PE teacher. Pairing concept teaching with those movement activities might be part of what was happening. But it's also practicing those concepts in a meaningful activity.

So again, bringing us back to strategy number two, but that's another really good one. So those are our five strategies and now we'll take a quick minute to chat about what this could look like. The book that I picked to demonstrate how we can target basic concepts using literacy based therapy is Zoe Gets Ready.

And so let's say we're focusing on on, so we'll use that iconic gesture throughout. If the on is a totally new concept, we might want to start with that structured teaching activity. If you are a member of SLP Now, you can go to the therapy plans tab and type in Zoe Gets Ready ,and then go to the Targets tab and you'll see all of the basic concepts there. If you click on on, it'll launch the structured teaching activity for on, and this will give the student different exemplars, and it'll use the evidence backed strategies that were pulled from the Seifert and Schwartz article,and help you do that direct instruction.

So before we dive into the thematic unit, we can do that structured practice. Once we've gotten exposure to that target, we might wanna revisit that activity multiple times, depending on how helpful it is for the student. Once we do that, we can dive into the actual contextualized activities.

So what those can look like throughout the unit is pre-story knowledge activation. We might do a virtual field trip, like a YouTube video of different outfits.

And so that can be something that we can do for the virtual field trip, or we can look through the pictures of the book and talk about what we know about clothing and dress up. Throughout those activities, we can model and recast, examples like she's putting on the tiara and she's putting on the boots.

And then we can use our iconic gestures or our visual icon to emphasize that. We can do activities too. If you have a doll set with different clothing items, that can be a way to introduce the vocabulary that's going to be in the story.

We could also use that for phase four of the unit. For step two, when we're actually reading the book, we can model the concepts naturally and maybe just put a slight emphasis on them and talk about the things that are happening, like using, emphasizing the on as it's happening on the story pages.

Then for story comprehension, we can ask questions that embed that concept as well. So like, where are her shoes? And they can say on her feet if we're at that level, if that's appropriate. We can use visual supports and all of that as we're giving that exposure. Then for step four, this is where we can revisit the unit. We can do some more of those play-based activities. In the early language unit, we have tons of play-based activity suggestions, like the dress up activity Check out the unit for even more ideas. And then for step five, this is typically the parallel story, so we can act out the story as a comprehension type of activity. This is a great meaningful context to target whatever basic concepts we're focusing on throughout the unit. They can create their own version of the story, and act it out and then we can emphasize those concepts and yeah, that's super fun.

Our takeaways here. Teach one concept at a time. Embed those concepts in meaningful context, after direct instruction. Use multiple exemplars. Starting with just one exemplar in the beginning might work better for some of our students. Using iconic gestures or visuals. And then collaborate when we can, embedding these concepts in the classroom, in PE, during snack time, all of that. So that is a recap of our strategies for basic concepts. I'd love to hear how you are using these and check out the show notes for the research articles and all of that good stuff.

If you are not a member of SLP Now yet, you can sign up for a free trial to check out the therapy plan and all of the activities I mentioned. The link will be in the show notes, but just head to slpnow.com/trial. You can sign up for free, no strings attached.

And you can access the therapy plans, like I said, all of those basic concepts, activities, we'll hope to see you soon and we'll see you in the next episode too.