Marisha

The Summer Before Your Clinical Fellowship Year (CF): 8 Tips for the Overachiever

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All you really need to do before starting your clinical fellowship is complete the necessary paperwork.

If you are anxious and would like to get a head start, here are some things that you can think about and get ready before you know your caseload.

1. Keep track of your start date and any important onboarding training dates.

You can also ask about specific trainings for new district SLPs. Don’t forget to add them to your calendar!

2. Check in with your supervisor.

You can ask them what the beginning of the school year will look like (e.g., time for planning, setting up, and caseload management).

Your supervisor might be able to tell you your school placement and what your caseload might look like. This can always change so take this with a grain of salt! I wouldn’t recommend buying and prepping tons of materials ahead of time.

3. Reflect on your strengths and needs as a new clinician.

What areas of the job will you need the most support with? Be honest, it’s easier to ask than to fix a mistake.

4. Explore self-care strategies.

This is KEY! It’s so easy to lose yourself in a new job. You can start by building healthy habits now (e.g., meal prepping, working out, hobbies). You can also plan vacations or mental health days. Think about what you need to take care of yourself and recharge your battery throughout the school year.

5. Explore organization strategies.

This is my favorite thing to talk about, and I have lots of ideas for you here. You can think about which planner to use, how to keep track of evaluations/IEPs, how to organize your therapy planning, etc etc.

6. Learn about behavior management strategies.

Here are some resources for a neurodiversity-affirming mindset.

– ASHA Voices: Two SLPs Talk Autism and Positive Self-Concept
– Autism and Neurodiversity: Addressing Concerns and Offering Implications for the School-Based Speech-Language Pathologist

7. Learn about cultural competency and trauma-informed care.

Check out ASHA’s practice portal for cultural competency tips.

Last but not least…

8. Take a break!

You just graduated! Know that you have the most recent, up-t0-date knowledge. You have a huge advantage here when it comes to making evidence-based decisions. Let your brain rest so you can start your CF with tons of energy!

ASHA CFY Requirements + Paperwork Checklist for CF-SLPs

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Getting the paperwork sorted might have been the most stressful part of starting my clinical fellowship, but I made it a lot more complicated than it had to be!

Biggest Takeaway: Don’t be afraid to ask for help! You’re not the only one going through this process, and you have tons of resources (i.e., your graduate program, your supervisor, your fellow graduates).

Here’s a quick overview of the paperwork that will be required to start (and complete!) your CF:

State Paperwork

There are one (or possible two) things that you’ll need for your state:

1. You’ll want to submit the required paperwork to your state for your temporary license if that is a requirement. Your supervisor can help you with your licensing paperwork.

2. You’ll also want to get your teaching credential. Your university should be helping you with this.

Every state is different, so check with your graduate program and look up your state requirements.

If you are starting a job in a different state than your graduate program, allow extra time for the process. Licensing paperwork usually takes around four to six weeks to process in my state.

ASHA’s Paperwork

Good news! Your ASHA paperwork doesn’t need to be turned in until the end of your CF, but you should know what ASHA’s requirements are. (It’s your job to do this! Don’t rely on your supervisor.)

Once you are ready to submit your paperwork, it’s a pretty simple online process! You can click here to fill out the form online.

You’ll also need these additional documents:

– Passing Praxis exam scores (sent directly to ASHA from ETS)
– Official graduate transcript which verifies the date and degree awarded (may arrive directly from institution)
– Speech-Language Pathology Clinical Fellowship (SLPCF) Report and Rating Form report through your online application portal
– Disclosure documents (if applicable)

Bonus Tips

If you were a member of NSSLHA for two years during graduate school, you are eligible for a “gift to the grad” discount that includes 20 months of membership for the price of 12.

ASHA states that it is the responsibility of the CF to verify that your supervisor is certificated. You can do a quick check online and should do so periodically throughout your CF. If your supervisor is not certificated, you will have to redo the portion for when their certification lapsed.

Planning Your First Week of Therapy

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Here are two questions to ask yourself when you are planning your first week of therapy:

How are you going to introduce yourself to families/parents? 

Here are some options:

1. Send out a letter introducing yourself to send home with students or via e-mail.

2. Connect with parents by calling or texting. (You can use your school phone or Google Voice.)

3. If your school has Seesaw (or a similar parent communication website), connect on that platform.

What will be your “first day” activity?

I always love a “getting to know you” activity!

Be sensitive when asking about family members and vacations.

1. Consider using language like “who lives at home with you” or “who takes care of you.”
Instead of “What did you do on summer vacation?”, try “What’s something you love to do or are interested in?”

2. Make a note of their responses. This can be therapy gold!

3. For any questions/activities, I usually model it and start with myself.

Here are some other ideas:

1. Ask what they liked (and didn’t like) about speech last year.

2. Review their goals.

3. Talk about why they go to speech and what we can accomplish together.

What about older students?

With older students, have a conversation on what they struggle with at school and let them know that we’re going to work on making goals together.

Consider asking them what their favorite candy and snacks are. If this is allowed, keep a stash for when they have a bad day or to increase buy-in.

Curriculum-Based Therapy Plans for Secondary Learners

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Supporting a persuasive essay assignment in speech therapy means targeting the language underpinnings behind it, not writing the essay itself, skills like identifying facts versus opinions, summarizing key details, using affixes to determine word meaning, and producing sentences with three or more clauses. Using a real classroom assignment as the curriculum-based activity, like a persuasive essay on a topic students are already invested in, gives these goals a genuinely functional, motivating context.

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This Week’s Episode: How to Integrate Curriculum into Therapy with Our Secondary Learners

I cannot believe we’re already wrapping up this month of curriculum-based therapy content! I don’t know about you, but I had a *lot* of fun with this one.

There is so much to learn about alternative service delivery models and creating the least restrictive environment for learning, so trust me when I say that this is definitely *not* the last time we’ll be making beautiful contextualized learning magic happen by blending literacy + curriculum-based therapy!

So far this month we’ve planned for our preschoolers, early elementary learners, and later elementary learners. This week we are going to focus on our secondary learners.

With this group of secondary students, we’re going to talk about identifying facts versus opinions, identifying the main idea and key details, summarizing and producing sentences with three or more clauses, and determining the meaning of words using affixes — and the curriculum-based activity we’re going to work on is writing a persuasive essay! 🙌

One of the struggles that our secondary students can come up against with this kind of work is pulling together different texts to support the arguments in their essay. It can be a challenge to break down the texts, which makes writing the actual essay feel impossible…but we can help to make that more manageable for them!

Oh and one quick reminder: Our job here is not to help the students complete the assignment, it’s to support the language underpinnings that they need in order to write the essay. What we really want to do is help our students foster independence by teaching them the tools and skills that they need to succeed! 💪

Let’s get to it, shall we?

Strategies + Tips Discussed:

– Summarize the Text
– Identify Key Details
– Identify Facts and Opinions
– Use a Graphic Organizer

Here’s what we discussed:

[4:30] Therapy Ideas for Step 1 (Pre-Story Knowledge Activation)
[5:36] Therapy Ideas for Step 2 (Reading)
[5:40] Therapy Ideas for Step 3 (Post Story Comprehension)
[6:35] Therapy Ideas for Step 4 (Skill Practice)
[8:16] Therapy Ideas for Step 5 (Parallel Story)

Links Mentioned

– ProCon Article: Paying College Athletes – Top 3 Pros and Cons
– The SLP Now One-Page Literacy-Based Therapy Unit Planner
– KWL Chart (In the SLP Now Membership)
– Summarizing Graphic Organizer (In the SLP Now Membership)

Subscribe & Review in iTunes

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Bonus points if you leave us a review over on iTunes → Those reviews help other SLPs find the podcast, and I love reading your feedback! Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews,” “Write a Review,” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is.

Thanks so much!

Transcript

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Wow. I cannot believe we are already wrapping up this month of curriculum-based therapy content. It's been really fun to dive into all of the things. This is definitely not the last time we'll talk about curriculum-based therapy and how we can use it with literacy-based therapy and all of that good stuff. Like I've been saying throughout all of these episodes, this is something that I think is incredibly important and I'm consistently trying to learn more and grow more in this area when it comes to like least restrictive environment, providing services in the classroom, alternative service delivery models. There is so much to dive into, but it's been a journey for me and I'm sure you're on a journey too. So I think it's still helpful to share, in of where I am at this point. And I'll continue to share what I'm learning and we have some exciting stuff coming up.
So it won't just be my perspective. So super, super excited about all of that. But this week we are working with some secondary students and the sample goals that I pulled for this group are, identifying facts versus opinions, identifying the main idea and key details, summarizing and producing sentences with three or more clauses, and then determining the meaning of words using affixes. So lots of good stuff here. And the curriculum-based activity that I chose to support was writing a persuasive essay. So this is something that I know I had to do as a freshman in high school. And it continued on throughout high school. And I remember doing all of these activities where we had to identify what was a fact and what was an opinion. I had ... I remember my sophomore year, one of my English teachers completely tore apart my essay and made me highlight all the parts.
So I've had a lot of practice with this and I've seen students work on this as well. So I thought it would be a really nice way, and I've done this with like one group in particular comes to mind. They had to write an essay and when they're writing these essays, they have to pull a lot of different texts to support their arguments. And a lot of our students have a hard time breaking down the texts, which makes writing the essay feel nearly impossible. So for this example, they, the students had to write an essay, a persuasive essay, and they got to pick the topic. So for this hypothetical group, they're writing an essay about whether college athletes should be paid and there are some really cool sites out there. One example is ProCon and so that's the example that I'm using today. So there's an article called, Paying College Athletes – Top 3 Pros and Cons.
And so that'll give us a really, it'll just be, like I'm not teaching the students how to write the persuasive essay, but I'm helping them. I'm implementing literacy-based therapy and giving them the strategies that they need while supporting their speech and language goals so that they can learn how to break apart the article, identify the information that they need, and then that'll get them closer to being able to write that essay. And just given our limited time with the students, this is just one example. And then I would try and coordinate with the other teachers and everything to make sure that all of the aspects are being covered. But I think this is where I felt like I was uniquely skilled and able to really support students. And it ended up working out really well with their goals. So, that's just how I decided to approach this.
So, diving into Ukranatist literacy-based therapy framework. If you want to follow along and jot down any notes or ideas, or if you want to start kind of planning your own unit, using this as some inspiration, you can head to slpnow.com/planner. But for step one, we can take an article walk in that we look at the article, we look at the title, we look at the picture, we look at the headings to get an idea of what it'll be about. And typically like with these persuasive essay topics, the students pick something that they are familiar with and that they already have an opinion on.
So hopefully we don't need to do a bunch of pre-story knowledge activation activities, but I think a KWL chart would be super interesting because the students likely know a lot about the topic, because they are likely very excited about sports and college sports and maybe they want to be a college athlete. Maybe they have an older sibling, who knows. So, they probably have a lot that they know, and they likely, because they know a lot, they probably have a lot of questions about the topic too, so we can fill in that KWL chart. And then as we read through the article, we can add in additional things that we've learned.
So I think that's a really great way to work through that. And then for step two, we'll just read through the article. And again, just my main goal is to make sure that students are engaged in attending to the article. And then for step three, we'll do some comprehension. So, because the students that I ... like in the hypothetical group don't have explicit comprehension goals. I assume that this is a relative strength for them. So I would just go through some literal and inferential questions to make sure that they're comprehending the text, but we would probably pretty quickly jump into summarizing.
So we would identify ... we would use the same strategies that we talked about last week and then also last month to help them summarize the text. And so we would identify who, where, what it's about and what's most important. And then we would identify the key details. This is also a great opportunity, because I feel like summarizing helps us move from step three to step four. So typically we would start filling in the summarizing graphic organizer and then we would transition to step four and we would do some practice. Maybe because the students are working on clauses, we would do some teaching of that, do some structured practice and then move into some like expanding sentences drill. And then we could use that to expand our summary, potentially, or just have some discussion around the article and practice expanding our sentences in that discussion. We could also do some teaching around fact versus opinion.
And if students are still struggling with that, we can back things up and take some very personal facts and opinions related to the group and do some practice there. And they could even play a little game like, is it fact or opinion, and they can make a statement and then the other members in the group have to determine whether that's a fact or an opinion, and they have to tell why. We could use a visual to support that, all of that good stuff. And then yeah. So, and then we would work through, once they get a good grasp of that, we can work on identifying the facts and opinions in the article. And this is a really important skill if they're being required to write a persuasive essay. A lot ... when I had to write them and when I've worked with students, they typically require them to like state an opinion and then support that with evidence.
So state their opinion and then list different facts. And if they have a really hard time differentiating, what's a fact versus an opinion. That is a very, very challenging exercise. And I found that taking some time to break that down makes that task much easier for our students. And then we would kind of continue working on their summary. And if they have the graphic organizer, they could pretty easily use that when it comes to writing their paper, I could give them ... if we don't have time to go through all of their articles, I could give them the graphic organizer and teach them how to do it. Maybe they could fill that in for homework and then they could use that. They could bring that to, like if they are working with a special education teacher, or whatnot, we could collaborate to make sure that they're continuing to use those strategies as they work through and start putting together their final persuasive essay.
So those are just some activity ideas to break that down. And I hope this is a helpful example, because our goal is not to complete the assignment. Just because I'm helping the ELA teacher and supporting that with the use of the persuasive essay, I'm not teaching them how to write a persuasive essay. I'm supporting the language underpinnings that they need to do that successfully. So I'm still very much staying in the speech and language zone and using my unique skills and perspective to set students up for success. And ultimately the goal is to have the students be independent with these underpinnings so that they have the tools and skills that they need to do this on their own. So, that's what that would look like. Hopefully that gives you lots of ideas and inspiration. I would absolutely love to see how you're applying this, where, what your journey is like with the framework. And yeah, I think that's a wrap. We'll see you next time.

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Curriculum-Based Therapy Plans for Later Elementary

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Using an expository text (like a science article already assigned in class) for curriculum-based therapy means pre-teaching key vocabulary first, since skipping that step can leave students unable to answer even basic comprehension questions, then moving into literal and inferential questions, scaffolded summarizing practice, and vocabulary journaling to give every student in the group meaningful practice, regardless of which specific goal they’re targeting.

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This Week’s Episode: How to Integrate Curriculum into Therapy with Later Elementary Students

If you’ve been a part of the SLP Now community for a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about the importance of meaningful, contextualized intervention once or twice. 😂

It’s part of why I’m such a fan of literacy-based therapy — and when you can pull materials from the curriculum, even better!

With this month’s learning series, our aim is to take those literacy-based therapy strategies that we’ve been discussing and embed the strategy into the classroom by applying it to materials from the curriculum. So far this month, we shared plans for our preschoolers and early elementary learners.

This week we’re going to tackle therapy plans for later elementary learners, and we’re going to do that with a group of hypothetical sixth graders who are working on answering questions, defining multiple meaning words, and summarizing texts.

Once we get the hang of these curriculum-based strategies, it becomes easier and easier to find ways to connect to the curriculum because it is so contextualized. You can pull pretty much any texts from the classroom and provide support in or outside of the classroom. 😍

Let’s dive in with a science expository text: A to Z article called Seeing the Evidence: Forensic Scientists at Work!

Strategies + Tips Discussed:

– The Literacy-Based Therapy Framework
– Pre-teach the  vocabulary
– Scaffold the text
– Model how to summarize the text

Here’s what we discussed:

[4:30] Therapy Ideas for Step 1 (Pre-Story Knowledge Activation)
[6:50] Therapy Ideas for Step 2 (Reading)
[7:08] Therapy Ideas for Step 3 (Post Story Comprehension)
[9:20] Therapy Ideas for Step 4 (Skill Practice)
[10:45] Therapy Ideas for Step 5 (Parallel Story)

Want to hear more about this topic? Click here to see this month’s content!

Links Mentioned

– A to Z Article: Seeing the Evidence: Forensic Scientists at Work
– The SLP Now One-Page Literacy-Based Therapy Unit Planner
– KWL Chart (You can find this in our SLP Now Membership!)

Subscribe & Review in iTunes

Are you subscribed to the podcast? If you’re not, subscribe today to get the latest episodes sent directly to you! Click here to make your listening experience auto-magic and as easy as possible.

Bonus points if you leave us a review over on iTunes → Those reviews help other SLPs find the podcast, and I love reading your feedback! Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews,” “Write a Review,” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is.

Thanks so much!

Transcript

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I have a group of sixth graders, hypothetically, who are working on answering questions, defining multiple meaning words, and summarizing texts. And we're continuing to follow the curriculum-based therapy theme and using content from the curriculum, or just chatting about ways to be more curriculum-based using a literacy-based therapy framework.
And I absolutely love the literacy-based therapy framework because it makes it really easy to implement contextualized intervention in a very meaningful way. And once we get the hang of the strategies, it's really easy to find ways to connect to the curriculum because it is so contextualized. It makes it really easy to pull pretty much any texts from the classroom and provide support in or outside of the classroom. I will admit that I have a little bit of experience providing intervention in the classroom, so a lot of the examples that I've been giving this month include work kind of outside of the classroom, and that's definitely something that I'm challenging myself with to figure out ways to work a little bit smarter there.
But this is my step in the journey of implementing, just connecting with the curriculum, collaborating with teachers, and pulling meaningful content, and then also sharing strategies and doing some lessons here and there. But I've been seeing some really, really cool articles about complete interventions in the classroom. That's something we're diving into and we'll have more content on soon. But this, I thought, it would still be helpful to share my journey and my progression towards curriculum-based therapy and the LRE and all of that.
For this particular group of students, they were doing a reading A to Z article in the classroom, and it was called Seeing the Evidence: Forensic Scientists at Work. Such a cool text. It was so much fun. I'm really excited to dive into this. And then if you want to follow along, and if you have a group that might be learning about forensic science in the classroom, or if you're wanting to use another text for a group of students using similar strategies, then head to SLPnow.com/planner, and you'll get a free copy of my one-page planner, so you can fill in your own text and goals as we go along. And hopefully these ideas will give you some strategies.
The forensic science article is an expository text. It's not story grammar, which is what I typically use with my younger students. And I find that a lot of times students still benefit from... They don't quite have a strong grasp of narratives in the very beginning, but this particular group of students was... it made sense to dive into the expository text at this point.
Yeah, so this gives us an opportunity to really focus in on summarizing and finding the main idea. And again, there's external evidence to support this as a strategy to improve comprehension. And last month we talked about a variety of strategies to work on summarizing and identifying the main idea. It was in the secondary episode. So, it was the fourth episode posted, but that will give you some... If you're wanting a refresher on some of those ideas, I'd really recommend checking out that episode. But it's basically just giving the students different self-monitoring tools, providing explicit instruction as always, and some scaffolding strategies.
Then, in terms of what we're actually going to do, I'll pull up my planner now, too. And then just to recap, we're using the article Forensic Scientists at Work. This is from reading A to Z. It is a paid subscription, but the goal of this is to use something from the classroom. So, if your teacher is using a Reading A to Z article, or you could apply this to any texts that they're using in the classroom. And the goals were targeting or answering questions, multiple meaning words, and summarizing.
For step one, our pre-story knowledge, we'd start off with an article walk and I would likely pull out a KWL chart as well. So, what they know about the topic already, what they want to know, and then later on, we can fill in what they learned.
With one particular group that I'm thinking about, they didn't have any background knowledge about forensic science, and it seemed like vocabulary was the biggest barrier for them. So, I did some pre-teaching where we identified some of the most important words, and we broke them down and we did a variety of activities. And if I'm being honest, when I used this text, I wasn't as familiar with the framework, and I actually just dove into reading the article. I completely skipped step one. Then we started doing story comprehension, and they weren't able to answer any of the questions.
So, that made me pause, and I realized that I actually needed to do the pre-teaching. I've definitely had my own literacy-based therapy and curriculum-based therapy fails. So, hopefully these podcasts episodes can help you learn from my mistakes. But I definitely had some internal evidence there that what I was doing was not working. That's why I'm super grateful for this framework, because I see my students making much more progress. And of course, that's just my internal evidence, but we also have... I do my best to share the external evidence, like data from the research that supports the use of these various approaches as well.
Back to the plan. We just did some pre-teaching of the vocabulary targets. They've got a good idea, a good grasp on what a victim and a suspect and all of that. And we've used our different vocabulary strategies to work on that. And then the next step we would dive into is shared reading. We would read through the text, and I keep this pretty simple. We just read through and make sure that students are staying engaged, but I don't do a lot beyond that. Like I said, I keep it pretty simple.
And that leads us to step three, where we dive into the story comprehension. This particular group was working on literal and inferential questions. So, I just started with the literal questions, and we did some comprehension there. That went well, which was exciting, so we continue to work on inferential questions. And then we started diving into summarizing as well, because that was one of their goals.
We used the strategies that I mentioned in the last episode from the Stevens et al. Articles, just different ways to scaffold. And some of the highlights were identifying sections of the text and then asking, "Who or what is the section about?" And then, "What is the most important idea about the who or what?" And then I would scaffold and support to students to write the gist.
Another way to do that is just make it shorter. Express it in a shorter form. If they struggle with that, we can, again, refer back to the text, or if we've done teaching of text structure, we can have them look at the text structure. And then of course, I want to make sure that I actually taught them how to do that, initially. So, sometimes I just dive into those strategies, but it's also really important to give them some explicit instruction before we expect them to start summarizing.
So, some ways to do that are to provide models of generating a summary. Maybe I would identify the main idea and just have a small section, and I would kind of talk through asking myself those questions. And then I would just kind of model my thinking out loud. Then I would give that students opportunities to practice and give them very specific feedback. Like, "Oh, I loved how you asked yourself the question about who or what is this section about. You did a great job identifying that, but you forgot to ask yourself what's the most important idea?" Or, "You just copied the text. Can you tell it in your own words? Write the gist. Make it in a shortened form, whatever makes the most sense." Hopefully those are some helpful examples in how to navigate that when it comes to summarizing.
And then we're at step four now. In this unit, we've already gotten to work on answering questions and summarizing and multiple meaning words, so we would just continue those in step four. I would take additional time to teach, as needed. I would have the students work on a vocabulary journal, and then this would be an opportunity to work on the other language skills as well. So, if they're working on answering questions, we can fill in the vocabulary journal, have discussion around that.
That benefits all of the students. It gives the students who have vocabulary goals, an opportunity to get more meaningful exposures. And it gives the students who are working on questions, also a meaningful... an opportunity to get more meaningful practice with those questions. And so, it just is a win-win all around. As long as we're choosing language, rich activities, we are golden and we can provide really amazing therapy.
Then I would also take some time to continue refining the students' summary. After we work on the comprehension and the vocabulary, we would revisit that summary and see if we can incorporate some of that vocabulary, and practice generating that summary. And that would give them, again, more meaningful opportunities to use their vocabulary in a meaningful context, all of that good stuff.
And then, step five of the framework is a parallel story. This is a little bit different if we're using a non-fiction text. I might have the students, maybe if we still need to work on narratives, if that's still one of the goals, they can make up a story and generate a story related to forensic science, or they can convince... Maybe they decide they want to become a forensic scientist. So, they write a persuasive, like a mini-persuasive essay about why they should be admitted to the forensic science program, or why it's important for us to have forensic scientists that can...
There's different ways to get creative and give students additional opportunities to use their target structures to embed their goals in meaningful contexts. Those are just some ideas. Hopefully that was a helpful framework. And then, next week we are diving into a curriculum-based therapy activity for our secondary students.

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Curriculum-Based Therapy Plans for Early Elementary

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Math word problems are a surprisingly effective curriculum-based therapy target, since the real barrier for many students isn’t the math itself, it’s the language: understanding vocabulary, instructional verbs, and explaining their reasoning in complete sentences. Pre-teaching tricky vocabulary from past word problems, acting them out to reduce overwhelm, and building a vocabulary journal can turn a math struggle into a genuinely rich language-therapy opportunity.

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This Week’s Episode: How to Integrate Curriculum into Therapy with Our Early Elementary Students

Let’s continue our trip on the curriculum-based therapy train and talk about some ideas for our early elementary learners! 🚂

With this month’s learning series, our aim is to take those literacy-based therapy strategies that we’ve been talking about, and embed the strategy into the classroom by applying it to materials from the curriculum.

Last week we targeted some language comprehension, vocabulary and grammar with our preschoolers. The specific targets were answering questions about a story, identifying basic concepts, and producing three-word sentences that are grammatically correct.

This week I share an example of how I was able to collaborate with a teacher to help a student that was struggling with math word problems!

When I first heard this, I was a little bit unsure…speech language pathology and math aren’t exactly known for going hand-in-hand. 🤣

But as I thought about it and looked at the student’s goals, I became convinced that this was a really great area for me to support!

Let’s dive in and focus on how to target answering questions, identifying key details, defining tier two vocabulary words, and producing compound or compound complex sentences with our later elementary students.

Strategies + Tips Discussed:

– Collaborate with the teacher to target goals
– Observe the teacher to see what kind of language is being used in class
– Pre-teach instructional verbs and unknown words that are being used in class
– Act out the word problem
– Create vocabulary journal

Reference

– Lowman et al. from 2018 that talks about teaching kindergartners instructional verbs, and I really loved their approach. In this study they recognize the importance of instructional verbs and they wanted to see if they could teach these kindergartners 12 words that they thought were really important.

Here’s what we discussed:

[3:50] Therapy Ideas for Step 1 (Pre-Story Knowledge Activation)
[6:50] Therapy Ideas for Step 2 (Reading)
[6:55] Therapy Ideas for Step 3 (Post Story Comprehension)
[7:09] Therapy Ideas for Step 4 (Skill Practice)

Want to hear more about this topic? Click here to see this month’s content!

Links Mentioned

– June Therapy Materials
– The SLP Now One-Page Literacy-Based Therapy Unit Planner

Subscribe & Review in iTunes

Are you subscribed to the podcast? If you’re not, subscribe today to get the latest episodes sent directly to you! Click here to make your listening experience auto-magic and as easy as possible.

Bonus points if you leave us a review over on iTunes → Those reviews help other SLPs find the podcast, and I love reading your feedback! Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews,” “Write a Review,” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is.

Thanks so much!

Transcript

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Here we go. Let's continue on the curriculum based therapy train and talk about some ideas for early elementary. So some of the goals that I'm targeting with this hypothetical group include answering questions, identifying key details, defining tier two vocabulary words, and producing compound or compound complex sentences. And so in this hypothetical, but also kind of similar to a real group that I've had, when I started implementing curriculum based therapy I went to the teacher of these students and I reviewed the student's goals with her.
So this is what Johnny and Anita and Juan are working on. So I reviewed the student's goals and I asked the teacher about her goals, like, "Where do you see them struggling?" And this particular teacher happened to have a professional ... or actually all of the second grade teachers had a professional learning goal to reach a certain benchmark for math word problems.
So when I first heard this, I was a little bit unsure, but the more I thought about it and the more that I'd looked at the student's goals, the more that I was convinced that this was a really great area for me to support, because math is way more than just numbers and operations. Math is incredibly rich with concepts in terminology, and the math isn't what was hard about the math word problems. It was understanding what was written, understanding the vocabulary. And then also the students were required to explain how they got to the correct answer.
So by pulling in these math board problems, it was a perfect way to target answering questions, identifying key details, defining tier two vocabulary words, and producing compound and complex sentences. I could not have thought of a better activity. So I got really excited as we started diving into these units and it ended up working out really well.
So I thought it would be fun to share something a little bit out of the box. And so just an example of a word problem that they might have been working on was, Joe had 40 marbles. Marlin gave Joe some more marbles. Now he has 65 in all. How many marbles did Marley give Joe? So if your brain is spinning already, my students' brains were absolutely spinning. So it's really a simple equation. It's just 65 minus 40 equals 25. So Marley gave Joe 25 marbles, but the students were really overwhelmed with language side of things, for a variety of reasons.
Then they were also required to produce some pretty complex language to explain their thinking as well. I hope your wheels are already turning too, because there's so, so much that we can do with this. So if you want to follow along with the literacy based therapy planner, this'll be a little bit different. And if you want to follow along, you can head to SLPnow.com/planner.
When we're working with a word problem, we can still take some of the steps. So we can take a word problem walk instead of a book walk for the first step of pre-story knowledge. So we'll look at the word problem and just see what we notice. A lot of times there's vocabulary that is challenging. When I was working on the word problems with these students this was kind of part way through the year. They had already been doing these word problems for a while. So I asked to get a stack of just the past word problems, and I went through and identified the vocabulary words that might be tricky for my students. And so I worked on making a list of ones that we might need to target.
This was inspired by, there's a really cool article by Lowman et al. from 2018 that talks about teaching kindergartners instructional verbs, and I really loved their approach. So in this study they recognize the importance of instructional verbs and they wanted to see if they could teach these kindergartners 12 words that they thought were really important. So, I worked with the teacher to identify the most important instructional words, and then they taught them and they taught them to preschool years before they went into kindergarten.
I thought that was a really cool well approach. And so I was like, "Can I use this? Can we identify vocabulary that students need within the word problems?" And then also there are some tier two words that they would need to use to explain their reasoning. So more of the thinking words, so that, I thought that was a really cool opportunity.
Then I observed the teacher giving a lesson or two just to see what her language was around it, and that could also be a good way to identify key vocabulary words to target, and then we could kind of work from there and prioritize the different targets. I could check in and do like a quick probe with the students to see for the students who have vocabulary goals to see which words we need to teach and all of that good stuff.
So we might do some pre-teaching of vocabulary. That was a very long tangent to say that we can pre-teach vocabulary too. We could identify unknown words in the word problem, or we could do like a little bit of a unit really honing in on the words that they need to explain their thinking and have some different practice around that. So that's what we've got for step one. And we might kind of act out some stuff if they're having ...
Because I think a lot of times the students seem to get overwhelmed with the language, so just acting out the word problem was a helpful strategy. It made it feel a little bit more approachable and that made the math part easier, but then it also made it a lot easier to actually solve the problem. So for step two, we would just read the problem. And then for step three, the comprehension, we would break it down and identify the most important parts. I might ask some basic questions just to make sure they understood it.
Then we would go into step four where we really work on our skills. So this is where we would work on identifying the key details, using that tier two vocabulary, producing those compound and complex sentences. I can take some time for teaching here, and if you want specific strategies for how to teach vocabulary, like I love a good vocabulary journal. I think that would be very appropriate here, especially since we would be coming back to these word problems.
Then I would also refer back to the grammar episodes for strategies for compound and complex sentences. But yeah, that's how it's definitely not a clear fit into literacy based therapy framework, but I think we can use some of the strategies that we've learned. And I think it's just a good example of how we can take something that we might not always consider as a good language target, but this ended up being really effective. The teachers were incredibly motivated to work with me. I got one of those word problems in my box multiple times a week, whereas before I implemented this, I was just, it was really hard to get anything from them. And it was something that the teachers were very motivated to collaborate on this. They were able to use some of the strategies. We worked together on some of the strategies.
So they were able to implement that, and it benefited students that weren't even on my caseload. So it's just a really cool way to get teacher buy-in, but also have a significant impact on our students and students that aren't in our groups or that aren't on our caseload. So just a really cool way to have an impact and all of that good stuff. So hopefully that gave you a good overview. I'd love to hear how like a unique therapy target that you might be inspired to use, and if you have any questions on how to implement some different strategies, I would absolutely love to chat and brainstorm. So next step is later elementary.

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Curriculum-Based Therapy Plans for Preschool

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Embedding curriculum-based therapy into a preschool classroom means pulling from activities students already do, like a familiar circle-time song, and combining a structured, drill-based approach (contrastive imitation) with frequent, natural modeling and recasting (focused stimulation) throughout play, snack, and other everyday classroom moments. Working directly in the classroom also makes it easy to model strategies for teachers, who can then continue reinforcing them even outside your direct sessions.

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This Week’s Episode: How to Use Curriculum in Literacy-Based Therapy

I cannot tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to this month of content, because we’re diving into all things curriculum-based therapy! 🤓

The goals we’re going to target in this unit with our preschoolers are: answering questions about a story, identifying basic concepts, and producing three-word sentences that are grammatically correct. We’ve got a good mix of targets with some language comprehension, some vocabulary, and some grammar. 💪

What we’re really aiming to do with this month’s learning series is take those literacy-based therapy strategies that we’ve been talking about, and embed the strategy into the classroom by applying it to materials from the curriculum.

The more that I read the research, the more that I see the importance of contextualized intervention.

Let’s get to it!

Strategies + Tips Discussed

– Contrastive Imitation + Drill-Based Activities
– Focused Stimulation + Frequent Modeling/Recasting

Reference

– Fey, Cleave, & Long (1997) describe a treatment approach in a preschool classroom. The therapists selected several grammar targets and cycled through the targets (a week for each). They used contrastive imitation and focused stimulation. Contrastive imitation was a drill-based activity, while focused stimulation included frequent models and recasts in a variety of activities (e.g., play, snack, and other common preschool activities).

Here’s what we discussed:

[7:30] Therapy Ideas for Step 1 (Pre-Story Knowledge Activation)
[8:53] Therapy Ideas for Step 2 (Reading)
[10:00] Therapy Ideas for Step 3 (Post Story Comprehension)
[11:24] Therapy Ideas for Step 4 (Skill Practice)

Want to hear more about this topic? Click here to see this month’s content!

Links Mentioned

– June Therapy Materials
– The SLP Now One-Page Literacy-Based Therapy Unit Planner
– Wheels on The Bus by Anthony Lewis
– SLP Now Membership (WH Questions activities are included in the membership!)

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Transcript

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Speaker 1: Hey there, SLP. I cannot tell you how much I've been looking forward to this month of content. We are diving into all things curriculum-based therapy, and we're getting started with a group of preschoolers. So the goals that we are going to be targeting in this unit are answering questions about a story, identifying basic concepts. So spatial temporal, qualitative, quantitative, and we'll also be chatting about producing three-word sentences that are grammatically correct. So I wanted to include a combination of different goals. So we've got some language comprehension, some vocabulary and some grammar. So hopefully that's a good mix. And hopefully it'll be a really good way to give you some ideas to step up all of the literacy-based therapy strategies that we've been talking about, but starting to embed them into the classroom and, or like pulling more from the curriculum. And I think this is especially important because the more that I read the research, the more that I see the importance of contextualize intervention. There's also a lot of talk about least restrictive environment and just getting creative with service delivery.
There's some really cool studies out there. I just read one about narrative intervention and they talked about having a whole unit in the classroom, a nine week structured unit, and this was one of the ASHA EBP briefs articles. So it was just kind of integrating a bunch of different articles to try and solve a clinical problem. And then the speech therapist ended up deciding, she decided to put together a nine week narrative instruction unit within the classroom. So she did it twice a week for 30 minutes and I've just been reading more of this kind of staff and it's just really interesting to think about how we can change up what we're doing and move away from sticking with 30 minutes once or twice a week in the speech room. That's our default, that's what we kind of stick with and having very little variation.
And I think the more that we learn, the better that we can kind of customize each student's service delivery and just how we put together their IEP and have it truly be individualized. So I'm really excited to start exploring this topic. This is something that I definitely still have room for growth in. I did a little bit of intervention in the classrooms and I have implemented some alternative service delivery in terms of like getting creative with the minutes and just moving away from the 30 minutes once or twice a week model. But I definitely still have room for growth. So I'm excited to continue diving into the research and experimenting as I figure things out. But with my preschoolers, I've actually done a lot in the classroom. And so that's what I'll focus on today. So the book that we're using is Wheels On The Bus, and it's a song that...
This is something that they use, I think pretty much every preschool classroom that I've been in sings Wheels On The Bus. They watched the YouTube video for it. And so I thought it would be a fun way to target some of our speech and language goals, provide some visual supports and then just target our skills in a meaningful way. And if I'm able to do this in the classroom, model it for the teachers and the assistants. It's also a really meaningful context for the students, because if I teach them some strategies or whatnot, they'll be able to... It'll be really easy for them to generalize because I taught them in that original context. So it's just really cool. I've been able to take books into the classroom, and then I've found that the teachers end up using them, especially if we collaborate on the book selection.
And then it just really benefits everyone because I teach them some new strategies and we really get to collaborate and find ways to really impact our students. So let's figure out what this would look like using a literacy-based therapy framework. And I use a planner to map out my units, it's just a one-page sheet. So I just put in the texts, so we're using Wheels On The Bus and I write the goals at the top of the page. So that for this hypothetical group, we're working on answering questions, identifying basic concepts, and then producing three-word sentences or three-word utterances that are grammatically correct. And yeah, so we're going to be... Oh, and if you want a copy of this planner, you can head to SLPnow.com/planner to fill this in, just like put in the ideas that I have share or think of your own group and jot down some of their goals and see how you can implement this, and just adjust my ideas to make it work for your students' goals.
But when I think of a preschool classroom, I think of their day usually consists of play centers, having rotations, they have snack, they have circle time where they sing music. So these are all different types of activities that we can support and help students use their language. And one study, Fey, Cleave, Long in 1997 describes the treatment approach in a preschool classroom, which I think is a really good example to pull from. But the therapist in the study selected, and this was focused on grammar. So we have one grammar goal, but I think we can look at some other options and get creative and use this kind of model and implement all of the other evidence back strategies that we've used and that we've discussed over the last several months on the podcast and we can kind of integrate all of that together.
But in this particular study, they selected several grammar targets that their students needed to work on and they cycled through the targets. So they spent one week on each of the targets and they use contrast of imitation and focus stimulation. So definitely head back to the preschool grammar episode, if you want a refresher on that. But they did contrast of imitation as a drill based activity. And then they use focused stimulation in all of the different types of activities that I listed like play, snack, circle time, all of that good stuff. So this is something that we could easily embed within the classroom. And when we talked about vocabulary, there's another similar study that describes a treatment approach used in a preschool classroom and it has like a very structured example of how they implemented it.
So I think we can draw some really cool ideas from both of those studies. So when it comes to pre-story knowledge, so step one of Dr. [Yukarance's 00:08:50] framework. We can do a book walk and we can look at the pictures and we can see if the students are able to identify the bus or the people or the different actions. And this is a little different where this is not of the most developed story in the world. We're focusing more on basic grammar and vocabulary than story retell and all of that. But I think this is a great introductory activity, especially if it's a song that they're going to use throughout the year. And then we can talk about like if the students ride the bus to school, we can talk about what they do with that.
And maybe I could even meet them at the bus and we could talk about like the wheels and "Oh, here's the driver and here are the people," and just kind of connect what we're reading in the book to what we're doing there. If we could actually listen to the song on the bus, that would be pretty epic. So I don't know. We could get creative here, but those are just some options. If we want to like take a field trip or I think a play-based activity would be super fun. I feel like every preschool classroom has one of those play buses. And so as they're playing with the bus, we can do some different language activities, as like a pre-story knowledge activity or later in the unit. So those are just some ideas for what we would do for step one. For step two, we would read the text.
And I've worked in a variety of preschools, so for some of the classrooms, the students really benefited. It was difficult just to get them to attend to the story, but as they got familiar with it, they were much more willing to participate. So the first time we did a reading was always a little bit rough and we would just work really hard to keep them engaged in the story, but then over... I would read on Monday and then the teacher during circle time, she would continue to read the story. And so I would just have to be there on Monday during circle time, and then I could come in during other parts of the days, once she had like seen me read, saw of my different models, and we discussed the strategies that we want to use. Then she continued it for me so I could jump in at different points in the school day to help with the more of that contrast of imitation, like doing that drill based activity as well as focused stimulation during different activities as well.
So then for story comprehension, we have some very simple WH question cards. So I think those are a great approach for the types of students we would be working on this with. So it has simple like who and what questions, for example, and they're leveled as well. And I would use different cards depending on the study students' needs, but some of them they're just learning the meaning of the different question words. So we might just, if I ask them a who question, the visual choices might only include people and that's a way to include some of that errorless learning. But then if they're starting to understand the meaning of the different question words, I might give them a question with like a who question with a person, a location, and another answer as well, so that they actually have to understand.
So that's a good way to scaffold the comprehension piece. And we have visual choices, so it's easy to... Even if a student isn't at the level of producing a response independently, we can scaffold them and maybe we can even make it a field of two choices, or we can make it errorless and help them identify it. And if they're using an AAC device, we can help them find the answer on their device and so on and so forth. So there's lots of ways to scaffold that and set students up for success there. Then when we dive into step four for the focus skill activities, this would be like following Fey et al. model. It would just be jumping in with the students in the classroom in a variety of activities, whether they're doing play centers, or during snack time, or whatever it may be, I would embed the different skills that we've been working on in those meaningful contexts.
And so maybe we can do like a best craft, or maybe we can play with the toy bus, or maybe we can take a cardboard box and pretend we're going on the bus. Then we can use that as an opportunity to use our basic concepts because that's one of the goals that we had or to produce a three-word utterances. I would be modeling that and recasting and using all of those in a meaningful context. And so, hopefully that's a helpful recap of some of the different strategies that we can use for the students. And then next up is early elementary.

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Targeting Narratives with Literacy-Based Therapy: Secondary

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For secondary students, literacy-based therapy shifts from narratives toward expository texts, focusing on identifying the main idea, key details, and summarizing. A simple two-question scaffold, who or what is this section about, and what’s the most important idea about that who or what, helps students move past reciting the first sentence of a paragraph and toward genuinely identifying the main idea, a skill research shows meaningfully improves comprehension for older students.

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This Week’s Episode: How to Identify the Main Idea, Key Details and Summarizing

So far in this series we have focused on answering questions, sequencing, describing, and story retell with our preschoolers. We continued to build on these skills and focused on how to use explicit instruction to target narrative generation with our early elementary students and our later elementary students. 

This week we’re going to wrap up our series on narratives with a unit for our older students, and this differs from what we’ve done in the last few weeks because we tend to shift more towards expository text — especially if they have a solid understanding of the story grammar framework.

This age group spends less time with narratives and more with those expository texts, so we really want to work on: identifying the main idea, key details, and learning how to summarize.

Solis et al. (2011) indicate that teaching sixth through eighth-graders with LD, how to summarize and find the main idea is an effective strategy to help improve understanding of the text.

These skills are really important not only for school work or studying to pass exams — but for real-world milestones like passing a driver’s test, understanding directions in a manual, or onboarding at a new job.

Setting them up for success starts now. Let’s get to planning, shall we? 

Strategies

Scaffold instruction, model use of strategy, use graphic organizers, and give students ownership (Pyle et al., 2017).
Read the text, use self -monitoring tools, and use explicit instruction (Solis et al,. 2011).
Scaffold finding the main idea of a text (Stevens et al., 2019).

Here’s what we discussed:

[8:35] Therapy Ideas for Step 1 (Pre-Story Knowledge Activation)
[9:19] Therapy Ideas for Step 2 (Reading)
[9:30] Therapy Ideas for Step 3 (Post Story Comprehension)
[10:10] Therapy Ideas for Step 4 (Skill Practice)
[11:25] Therapy Ideas for Step 5 (Parallel Story)

Want to hear more about this topic? Click here to see this month’s content!

Links Mentioned

– The SLP Now One-Page Literacy-Based Therapy Unit Planner
– ReadWorks Article: Vitamin G for Your Mind
– SLP Now Membership
– May Therapy Plans
– Targeting Grammar with Literacy-Based Therapy: Preschool, Early Elementary, Later Elementary, and Secondary
– Targeting Vocabulary with Literacy Based-Therapy Preschool, Early Elementary, Later Elementary, and Secondary

Subscribe & Review in iTunes

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Bonus points if you leave us a review over on iTunes → Those reviews help other SLPs find the podcast, and I love reading your feedback! Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews,” “Write a Review,” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is.

Thanks so much!

Transcript

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Now we get to dive into something a little bit different for our older students, because with our older students, we tend to shift more towards expository texts, especially if they have a good understanding of the story grammar framework. They're really bombarded with expository texts throughout the school day and less so with narratives. So by teaching them how to identify the main idea, how to identify key details, teaching them how to summarize, those are skills that will be incredibly important as they move forward. Whether they're trying to pass their driver's test, or pass a social studies exam, or understand directions in a manual, or when they're starting a new job, these are skills that are incredibly important.
So instead of narratives, we're going to be focusing on summarizing for these students. And as I already alluded to, identifying the main idea and key details is one example of a goal. Another goal is to summarize the text. And Solis et al. from 2011 indicate that teaching sixth through eighth graders with LD, how to summarize and find the main idea is an effective strategy to help improve understanding of the text. And if they can learn to summarize and find the main idea of any given text, that could potentially have a very significant impact.
So what we're talking about today, we're discussing how to start targeting these skills using another ReadWorks article. Again, this is available for free at readworks.org. And the title of this article is Vitamin G For Your Mind, and just about the need for vitamin G. It's a little bit of a sciency article. So let's just dive in to our plans and I have a couple strategies that we can use. So Stevens et al., 2019, share a way to help us scaffold finding the main idea of a text.
So the question that I can ask is who or what is this section about and what is the most important idea about the who or what. And then I'm teaching the students to write the gist of the answers to those questions. So I thought that was a really helpful way because when I'm talking to students about identifying the main idea, a lot of times they'll say, "Well, the main idea is the first sentence in the paragraph." And then they just recite that. So I think these questions are super helpful in breaking that down. And being able to identify the main idea and really understand the main idea, I think is a huge step in the right direction. So just to recap, we want to know who or what the section is about and the most important idea about the who or what.
So that's how we can scaffold finding the main idea. And then just like who or what, and then the most important idea, and then kind of synthesizing that and finding the gist of that. And if our students struggle with this, we can remind them to go back to the text, especially if we start with an article that's a little bit more understandable and simple, that might be a good way to scaffold it as well. But just to have them go back to the texts, identify the who or what and the most important idea. And then there's also some cool research on reminding them to look at the text structure and teaching them the structure of the text. There's some really cool research out there. And like, for example, if it's a problem solving passage, the main idea will tell us the problem and the solution for that problem.
So if we can say, "Oh, this is a problem solution passage." So I need to know what the problem is and the most important thing about that problem is the solution. So I need to know the problem and the solution, and that'll give us the main idea. So I think that's a really cool way, like by teaching the text structures, we can set them up for success and give them additional strategies. And yeah, this study found by using this approach students were better at stating the main idea and understanding different text structures. So some other strategies that we can use. So when we're reading the text, and this kind of like goes along with what Stevens et al., 2019, what that article said, but we can highlight what's most important and then just work on expressing that in a shorter form.
So that's, instead of writing the gist, like expressing it in a shorter form might be another to say that, if students don't understand writing that gist. We can also help students use self-monitoring tools. So maybe after they read a paragraph, can they check-in with themselves to make sure that they understood it? And we also want to make sure that we're using explicit instruction. So I think the Stevens et al. article gives a really nice way to set that up. So we can model asking ourselves these questions, like who or what was this about? What was most important about that who or what? And so we'll model that and think out loud and model our thinking as we're identifying the main idea of a section or a paragraph or an article. And then we want to give students feedback as they're doing this on their own.
So have them read a section and ask them to kind of talk about what they think the main idea is, and if they need support with that we can kind of give feedback on, "Oh, so it sounds like you identify the who, but what's most important about that?" So just giving them feedback, really specific feedback to help guide them towards the main idea. Or if they did it perfectly, we can give them specific feedback there like, "Great job. You identified the what of that section and what's most important about that." And so we can just identify what they've done and what they need more support with. And then just providing them with tons of opportunities for guided and independent practice. And next month, we'll be talking all about curriculum-based therapy and how to kind of start, because when I teach about this, I think it's really helpful just to take one text and use it across multiple groups.
It helps you learn the strategies very quickly and it gives you some confidence in the different evidence-based strategies. But once you get comfortable with this, I like to challenge SLPs to incorporate different elements of the curriculum. So whether you're just simply selecting articles that are related to what they're discussing in the classroom, or if you want to take it a step further and really can set up strong communication with your teachers and pull in articles that they're actually using in the classroom, or even just using their textbook, whatever they happen to be like, "What are you reading in science today?" It can be as simple as that. But I think starting with like when you're first implementing this, you want to be able to put together some ideas. You want to read the texts before, so you can come up with some strategies. But once you get really comfortable with this, you can pull pretty much any text and implement these strategies.
And at that point, you would have gotten lots and lots of practice. And so it's easy to adjust and implement these strategies with pretty much any text. But anyway, that was a little bit of a tangent, let's get back to Vitamin G For Your Mind, this article that we're using. So again, to recap we're targeting identifying the main idea, identifying key details, and then summarizing the text. So for step one of the framework, we'll do some pre-story knowledge. We might just walk through the article. This one has nice headings and we might say, "Okay, so what is vitamin G?" What do the headings tell us? What do we think this will be about?" And we might just take a guess at what the main idea is and what we think will be most important. And maybe it's just questions at this point like "What questions do we think this article will answer?"
And we can do a KWL chart too, what we know, what we want to know, and then as we read, we can fill out the L like what we learned, but that can be a great pre-story knowledge activity, because then we can figure out if we need to do any additional pre-teaching. And then first step two, we would dive into actually reading the text. And then for step three, we would dive into some comprehension activities. So this really depends on where the students are, but we might ask literal and or inferential questions. And then we would also start diving, like we would start diving into all of the summarizing skills. And again, using that scaffolding procedure if needed, to help the students identify the main idea and to identify the key details. I really like using a graphic organizer, that makes it easier to kind of process all of the elements.
And, yeah, so that's what we would do for step three. And then for step four, we would be able to work on all of their other skills. And maybe in step three, we just focus on filling out the summary. And then after we've done all of our grammar and vocabulary practice, we can revisit the summary and make sure that we're including our new vocabulary and our new grammar. If we're working on compound and complex sentences or sentences with multiple clauses, we can expand that and include what we've learned. And then give the students the opportunity to practice like actually telling that summary and summarizing out loud. I think that's a great way to continue developing those skills. So for this example, we would just simply summarize the article. We could create a little video or create an animation to help us remember what the article was about.
And then again, still practicing our summarizing skills, integrating all of the grammar and vocabulary skills that we've targeted throughout the unit. And if you want more ideas for grammar or vocabulary, head back to previous months episodes for more details. And so that's what we would do for step four. And then for step five, this is typically the parallel story section, but I think it's a really great opportunity to take things a step further. So if we read an expository text and assuming it's something that's just largely informational, I think it's fun to explore different text structures.
So maybe we read this article about vitamin G and then the students can work on creating like a persuasive text or maybe we can read two articles about the same topic and then compare and contrast, but just diving into some of the different structures that they're using in the classroom. And that can be a cool way to talk about the different structures that they might encounter throughout their time in school and just give them additional strategies to navigate that. So, yeah, that's what we've got for this unit. And that's a wrap for all things narratives and summarizing, and we'll see you next month when we start sharing ideas for curriculum based therapy and really taking all of the things that we've learned over the past several months and taking it to the next level.

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Targeting Narratives with Literacy-Based Therapy: Later Elementary

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For later elementary students, narrative therapy builds on story grammar work by targeting answering questions about story elements, story retell, and story generation using a fiction article. Modeling a retell while purposefully leaving out an element (and having students catch the mistake) keeps the group engaged, while a graphic organizer scaffolds students toward eventually generating their own related story independently.

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This Week’s Episode: How to Target Narratives with Literacy-Based Therapy

Evidence shows that using literacy-based therapy to target narratives not only makes sense, but it really helps to set them up for literacy success in the future. Which brings us to this month’s focus: embedding narrative-based skills.

So far in this series we have focused on answering questions, sequencing, describing, and story retell with our preschoolers. As I was digging through the research, I was more and more convinced that story retell is something that makes sense to work towards!

We then continued to build on these skills and focused on how to use explicit instruction to target narrative generation with our early elementary students. 

This week we will continue to use these strategies with our later elementary students. We’ve got the evidence, we have the tools (and lots of graphic organizers 🤪 ), and I think we are on a roll!

By the end of this series, I hope you’re feeling confident enough to take part in the challenge that I mention at the end of this podcast. I believe you can do it!

Strategies + Tips Discussed

Hayward & Schneider (2000) found that identifying missing elements in stories yielded improvements in student narratives.
I will often model the story retell first, with the help of visuals. I purposefully leave out one or two of the elements, and have the students help to identify those pieces.Then, I can model being a good sport about making a mistake, and the whole experience feels a little more fun and my students get to act as teachers! 🤪

Feeling confident? 💪
I challenge you to put it all together. Connect with a teacher and ask about units that they are working on in the class. Then put together your own unit and implement curriculum based therapy.

References

Gillam, S. L., Olszewski, A., Fargo, J., & Gillam, R. B. (2014). Classroom-based narrative and vocabulary instruction: Results of an early-stage, nonrandomized comparison study. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 45, 204–219.

Hayward, D., & Schneider, P. (2000). Effectiveness of teaching story grammar knowledge to pre-school children with language impairment: An exploratory study. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 16, 255–284.

Paris, A. H., & Paris, S. G. (2007). Teaching narrative comprehension strategies to first graders. Cognition and Instruction, 25(1), 1–44.

Swanson, L. A., Fey, M. E., Mills, C. E., & Hood, L. S. (2005). Use of narrative-based language intervention with children who have specific language impairment. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 14, 131–143.

Here’s what we discussed:

[04:00] Therapy Ideas for Step 1 (Pre-Story Knowledge Activation)
[05:30] Therapy Ideas for Step 2 (Reading)
[05:42] Therapy Ideas for Step 3 (Post Story Comprehension)
[06:10] Therapy Ideas for Step 4 (Skill Practice)
[08:24] Therapy Ideas for Step 5 (Parallel Story)

Want to hear more about this topic? Click here to see this month’s content!

Links Mentioned

– The SLP Now One-Page Literacy-Based Therapy Unit Planner
– ReadWorks Article: Camping In Style
– SLP Now Membership – Our Book Activities include vocabulary cards, a story map, and WH question cards (literal and inferential) with multiple-choice picture cues!
– May Therapy Plans
– Targeting Grammar with Literacy-Based Therapy: Preschool, Early Elementary, Later Elementary, and Secondary
– Targeting Vocabulary with Literacy Based-Therapy Preschool, Early Elementary, Later Elementary, and Secondary

Subscribe & Review in iTunes

Are you subscribed to the podcast? If you’re not, subscribe today to get the latest episodes sent directly to you! Click here to make your listening experience auto-magic and as easy as possible.

Bonus points if you leave us a review over on iTunes → Those reviews help other SLPs find the podcast, and I love reading your feedback! Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews,” “Write a Review,” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is.

Thanks so much!

Transcript

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Speaker 1: Let's dive into some therapy plans for later elementary students. We are going to be using a fiction article from ReadWorks, and we're focusing on how to target narratives using a literacy based therapy framework. So some of the types of goals that we might target if we're focusing on narratives are answering questions about story grammar elements, retelling a story, of course, including story grammar elements, or generating a narrative. So we've got answering questions, story retells, story generation. Just a quick recap of some of the rationale behind using that. So explicit instruction of story grammar elements give students a meaningful framework and that's cited across the literature. There's plenty of support for using a story grammar elements and a really cool quote from Thomas Sello in 2003, indicates that using these story, grammar elements makes language learning tasks less demanding, more meaningful, and more authentic.
Paris and Paris in 2007, found that teaching story grammar enhances student comprehension, which is fascinating to me. There was a study that I came across, where they taught this framework to older students. And they taught story grammar elements, and they had a whole curriculum around it. And then they found that students comprehension of an actual lecture improved as well. So that kind of goes along with some of the citations I just shared, that it makes language learning tasks less demanding. It gives them a framework so they can hang these different pieces of information off of a more meaningful structure and make more sense of the input that they're getting. So I think that's really cool. I've been diving into a lot of narrative articles and the more and more I read about it, the more impressed I am. And it's such a cool way to target both lower and higher level language skills. So it's, we can target grammar and vocabulary, but then really focus on embedding those targets in a really meaningful context and targeting story grammar in the context of authentic stories. There's lots of evidence around that as well.
So without further ado, the article that we're talking about this week is called Camping in Style. You can access it for free on ReadWorks.org. You just have to sign up. As an educator, you get access to that for free. And it's just, they have beautiful articles and stories on there. Tons of search features. This article in particular is about Vivian and Kyle. So they are the main characters here. And Kyle loves camping, but none of his friends want to go. So he decides to create a camping experience that's quite glamorous. And it just tells the process of them building this campground. So nice seasonal kind of topic.
And yeah, so let's dive into the actual plans. So again, we're targeting answering questions about story grammar elements, story retell, story generation. Before we dive into the article, we'll look at the title. We'll look at a couple of like, just kind of glance at some of the texts to get an idea of what the story might be about. And this is where I kind of decide if the students have... I'll ask them some like pre-story knowledge questions. Have you ever been camping? Do you know what glamping is? And we'll just talk about some of those. Well start a discussion and then I'll determine if we need more background knowledge or not. And for this particular example, I think it'd be super fun to watch a YouTube video about glamping, for example. Or take a tour of a fancier camp ground or whatnot.
And I think that would be a really great way to fill in knowledge as needed. And then we would go ahead and fill in the graphic organizer and do some explicit teaching of the story grammar elements if needed. We would infer who the characters are, what the setting is, what the initiating event is, et cetera, et cetera, so that we can just get some meaningful exposure. And I think it's a fun inference activity and that can help us know if they really struggle with this, maybe we need to do a little bit more pre-story knowledge activation. Maybe there's vocabulary impacting their ability to fully participate in that. So we might do some pre-teaching, whatever they need. I will see the breadcrumbs and determine the best approach based on that.
Then for step two, we would read the article. I would read it or we could do round Robin reading, whatever makes the most sense for the group, whatever he keeps the most engaged. And then for step three, we would dive into some story comprehension. So this depends on the dynamics of the group, but we might have a combination of literal and or inferential questions. But I would ask them questions about story grammar. So like, who were the characters? What was the setting? And just go through the icons and fill in a fresh graphic organizer. Now that we've actually read the story.
And then that brings us to step four, the focus skill activities. So in step four, I always take some time to teach skills as needed. And if you want examples of what I do for grammar and vocabulary, head back to previous months episodes, because that'll give you more strategies. Today, we're just focusing in on narratives. So I would continue to include explicit teaching of story grammar elements, as much as students need with that. And I would continue to use graphic organizers and or visual cues as needed by the students.
I talked about the research behind that in last week's episode. But the citation for those specific strategies comes from Gillam at all of 2014, and then also from Paris and Paris, 2007. And some other strategies that we might use are to have students identify like, this is what we're using throughout the unit, but having them identify story grammar elements from within the article. But then I think it's also helpful to have them identify missing elements. So whether sometimes we have to infer elements in the story so we can use that.
But I also like to take this approach and as I often model the story retell first, and I might do a couple iterations where first I model it with the use of visuals. And then I say, okay, let me try this without the graphic organizer. Let's see if I can remember. And then I'll retell the story, but I'll purposefully leave off one or two of the elements. And then I have them identify those, the elements that I missed. And then I kind of model being a good sport about making a mistake and then we just make it a game. And the other students get to try to retell the story and we help each other and identify elements that we've missed. And this keeps everyone engaged throughout the whole unit. And it's just a really fun way to put things together.
So that wraps up step four. And then for step five, we get to dive into a parallel story, which brings us into story generation. So the students get to generate their own story at this point. And I typically like to have it be related to the topic that we've discussed. So we'll again, pull out another graphic organizer if needed. If the students are really getting the hang of the framework and they are able to just come up with a story, I'd like to see what they can generate on their own. So just go around the group and see, okay, so can you tell a story about a time that you went camping, or make up a story about a camping trip, or whatever prompt seems to resonate with the students. And then I think it'd be really cool to see what they can come up with without any support and see how they do in generating a story.
And then we can kind of go from there. And you'll be able to know if that's an appropriate step for your students or not. Do they need more support initially? You kind of want to find that sweet spot and not have huge levels of stress and frustration. So if you think that they really need that graphic organizer to get started, then you can definitely offer that. So, that's what we've got for our fiction article. And I think a really cool way to take this a step further if you're feeling like, okay, I've got this, I've implemented it with a couple of groups. I'm feeling really good. When I teach about literacy based therapy and the framework, and using all of these strategies, I think it makes sense to start with maybe a book for your K through two students. And then an article for your third through fifth graders. And just like using one text across grade levels.
But we've been talking about this for a while and if you've been listening to all of these episodes and you've been implementing it, I do have a little bit of a challenge. So I think that's a great, amazing, perfect way to get started. But if your anything like me, you're always trying to grow and learn. And so I think it could be really helpful to connect with the teachers in the classroom and pick something that is more curriculum based. So because once you get good at using this framework, once you get some good practice in, then it doesn't take as much planning time and you can easily throw together a unit with pretty much any texts, especially if you've been building out your visuals to teach these skills. You can take pretty much anything and run with it with very minimal prep time.
So I challenge you just for one of your groups, connect with a teacher and identify a theme that they're working on in the classroom and select a book that's related to that. Or just pick a book that they're actually reading in the classroom, or pick an article that they're actually reading. Or if you want to take it a step further next month, we're talking all about curriculum based therapy and selecting a bunch of different things, even math problems. So that's definitely something to stay tuned for. But I just wanted to give that a quick plug in case you're feeling like, okay, okay, I got this, this feels super easy. I'm ready for the next challenge. Definitely kind of take that on as you're ready. Or stay tuned for the curriculum based therapy content next month. And if this doesn't feel easy to you just yet, just keep chugging along. Take one piece a week, or a month, whatever you can handle, just take it slow. As long as you're taking steps forward, you're heading in the right direction. And I can't wait to see where you end up.

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Targeting Narratives with Literacy-Based Therapy: Early Elementary

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For early elementary students, narrative therapy focuses on answering questions about story grammar elements, retelling stories, and eventually generating original stories. Explicit teaching of story grammar elements paired with graphic organizers and visual cues gives students a meaningful framework, research shows this approach improves both comprehension and the complexity of students’ own oral narratives, with support gradually faded as students retell the story with less and less prompting.

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This Week’s Episode: How to Target Narrative Generation

Evidence shows that using literacy-based therapy to target narratives with preschoolers not only makes sense, but it really helps to set them up for literacy success in the future. Which brings us to this month’s focus: embedding narrative-based skills. Last week we focused on answering questions, sequencing, describing, and story retell with our preschoolers.  As I was digging through the research, I was more and more convinced that story retell is something that makes sense to work towards!

This week we’re going to use explicit instruction to target answering questions about story grammar elements, practice retelling the story, and then work on narrative generation with our early elementary students.  We are going to target those skills by reading A Camping Spree with Mr. McGee and provide visual support with our story grammar organizer. 🏕

Let’s get to it!

Strategies + Tips Discussed

Gillam et al. (2014) say that, “Narrative instruction should include explicit teaching of story grammar elements using graphic organizers and, or visual cues.”

– Book Walk: Use a story grammar organizer and Inferential questions about what may happen in the story
– Story Comprehension: Use Literal WH questions after the story is read. You can use that story grammar organizer again. It provides a clear framework for the student to follow!
– Focused Skill Activities: Retell the story by identifying the story grammar elements: “If students can identify story grammar elements in stories, that has been shown to yield improvements in complexity and content of oral narratives. ”  Hayward & Schneider in 2000
– Model the story grammar elements and use visual supports. Ask the student to help identify the story grammar element but purposefully leave out one of the elements.
– Parellel Story: Use a fresh graphic organizer and have the student create their own story

References

Adlof, S. M., McLeod, A., & Leftwich, B. (2014). Structured narrative retell instruction for young children from low socioeconomic backgrounds: A preliminary study of feasibility. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 391.

Gillam, S. L., Olszewski, A., Fargo, J., & Gillam, R. B. (2014). Classroom-based narrative and vocabulary instruction: Results of an early-stage, nonrandomized comparison study. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 45, 204–219.

Hayward, D., & Schneider, P. (2000). Effectiveness of teaching story grammar knowledge to pre-school children with language impairment: An exploratory study. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 16, 255–284.

Paris, A. H., & Paris, S. G. (2007). Teaching narrative comprehension strategies to first graders. Cognition and Instruction, 25(1), 1–44.

Swanson, L. A., Fey, M. E., Mills, C. E., & Hood, L. S. (2005). Use of narrative-based language intervention with children who have specific language impairment. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 14, 131–143.

Here’s what we discussed:

[03:07] Therapy Ideas for Step 1 (Pre-Story Knowledge Activation)
[06:20] Therapy Ideas for Step 2 (Reading)
[06:35] Therapy Ideas for Step 3 (Post Story Comprehension)
[07:16] Therapy Ideas for Step 4 (Skill Practice)
[10:40] Therapy Ideas for Step 5 (Parallel Story)

Want to hear more about this topic? Click here to see this month’s content!

Links Mentioned

– The SLP Now One-Page Literacy-Based Therapy Unit Planner
– A Camping Spree with Mr. Magee
– SLP Now Membership – Our Book Activities include vocabulary cards, a story map, and WH question cards with multiple choice picture cues.
– May Therapy Plans

Subscribe & Review in iTunes

Are you subscribed to the podcast? If you’re not, subscribe today to get the latest episodes sent directly to you! Click here to make your listening experience auto-magic and as easy as possible.

Bonus points if you leave us a review over on iTunes → Those reviews help other SLPs find the podcast, and I love reading your feedback! Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews,” “Write a Review,” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is.

Thanks so much!

Transcript

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Let's dive into some therapy plans for our early elementary students. This week we're focusing on narratives. So, a little bit of background. Last week we talked about how it could be appropriate to target these skills with preschoolers, and it's especially, especially appropriate with our early elementary students. I wanted to share a little bit of the rationale and some of the evidence behind that. Explicit instruction on story grammar elements provides students with, or children, with a framework and it giving them that explicit instruction makes language learning tasks less demanding, more meaningful, more authentic. And the Paris & Paris article from 2007 shows that teaching story grammar enhances student comprehension, and it's a really meaningful context for therapy. So this comes from the Adlof et al. from 2014, but, "Focusing on narratives during oral language intervention provides a medium for clinicians to target both lower and higher-level language skills simultaneously."
So we've got lots of meaningful outcomes that we can generate when we're targeting narratives, and using story grammar, and all of those elements. And then to take it one step further, so this is from Swanson et al., 2005, but they said that teaching story grammar in the context of authentic stories, like books or fiction articles, which is what we're talking about this month, that yielded clinically significant improvements in students' oral narratives. So there's lots of benefits to using this approach. So hopefully you're convinced.
Some potential goals that we could be targeting throughout this unit related to narratives are answering questions about story grammar elements, retelling a story including story grammar elements, or generating a narrative. So we've got answering questions, story retell, narrative generation. So those are some of the different skills that we'll be talking about throughout the unit.
The book that we're using is, A Camping Spree with Mr. Mcgee. So this is a story about Mr. Mcgee and his dog and they go on a camping trip, but unfortunately they land their little camper ends up in the water and that's a problem that they get to solve. But it's a very sweet story. Perfect for this time of year. So, let's dive into the actual unit.
Our first step is pre-story knowledge. I like to start with a book walk. We would look at the cover, we would flip through some of the pages, and by doing that, I get a good idea of how much the students know about the topic. Have they ever been camping? Do they have trouble describing what's on the pages or, sorry, nice steady stream of language? That can give me an indication of whether we should do additional background like pre-story knowledge activities.
So if they're not familiar with camping, if they're struggling with that vocabulary, we might do a virtual field trip and watch a YouTube video about a kid who goes camping, or I'd take a tour of a camper, or whatever it may be. Whatever ... I just use my clinical judgment here to decide what areas students need additional exposure and information in. So once we do that or if they are all avid campers, they've got great vocabulary around it, then we can dive into the graphic organizer. So before we dive into that how to use ... Because this is the first super narrative-based activity that I'll be mentioning, I want to back up a second and talk about some of the research behind why I'm setting things up the way that I am.
The first thing is that I use visual supports. Gillum et al. in 2014, they indicate that, "Narrative instruction should include explicit teaching of story grammar elements using graphic organizers and, or visual cues." So we're going to include explicit instruction of the story grammar elements, and then we'll also use graphic organizers and visual cues. The use of the visuals and graphic organizers was also supported by Paris & Paris in 2007, and they indicate that that enhances student comprehension.
I have two other strategies, but I think we'll save those until we get to step four. But just to give students an opportunity to get explicit teaching of those story grammar elements and to include that graphic organizer in the visual cues, I have a story grammar poster and after we do the book walk and the pre-story knowledge activation activities, I like to have students take their best guess and try and fill in the story grammar organizer. And if they need explicit teaching of what the characters, and the setting, and all of that, if they need explicit teaching of those elements, then I will do that at that time, but we can fill in and make some inferences about the story.
So, after looking at the cover, we see Mr. Mcgee and his dog, so it's pretty easy to infer who the characters are by looking at a couple of pictures. We can infer the setting by looking at a couple of pictures. We can infer the initiating event, and the plan, and all of that. I think that's a really great opportunity to give students a little bit of a framework on what's happening and just to solidify all of the pre-story knowledge stuff that we talked about.
Then for step two, we'd go through and read the story. This is definitely the shortest and simplest step of the framework. It's pretty quick.
And then for step three, we would dive into some story comprehension. So typically, I include depending on the student's needs, we'll have just literal questions, maybe some inferential questions, but one other thing that I really like to do is ask questions about story grammar. So, I would pull out that framework again, that graphic organizer. I have lots of copies. I just have multiple copies running. I keep the pre-story one and then just grab a fresh one for the actual story, and then I'll ask them, "So who was it about?" and, "What was the setting?" We'll go through and answer that was comprehension questions related to story grammar.
Then when we get to step four for the focus skill activities, of course, this is also where we target grammar, and vocabulary, and all of that. If you're wondering about strategies for those units, check out past episodes where we shared tons of strategies just for the general literacy-based therapy framework, as well as grammar and vocabulary. But today, we'll just be talking about what we can do with narratives.
Some other strategies supported in the literature are identifying story grammar. "If students can identify story grammar elements in stories, that has been shown to yield improvements in complexity and content of oral narratives." That was from Hayward & Schneider in 2000. Hayward & Schneider also found that identifying missing elements in stories yielded improvements in student narratives.
So that gives us some ideas of what we could potentially try in our therapy session to help our students with narratives. As we're retelling the stories, and we talked about using visuals and the graphic organizer, so in step three they answered those questions and we probably filled them into the story grammar organizer.
And then in step four, we can work on retelling the story. I've done this a number of ways, but I typically do a model first, I point to the visuals and go through, and then I give the students an opportunity to practice retelling the story as well. If we were targeting grammar and vocabulary, we'd probably do those things first so they can embed those skills into their narratives.
But then we would ... I think this is a really cool way to identify missing elements. So I might do a model myself and I would have them check off and make sure that I'm including all of the elements that we need, and then I might do like the perfect version first and then, okay, let me try it again. And then I might go through and tell the story, but I might leave out one of the elements. Then they would have to ... Or maybe I'd try it with the visuals first and then I'd put the visuals away and like, "Okay, help me make sure that I include all the elements," and then I might leave out the setting, for example, and then the students can help me identify, "Oh, you left out the setting." And then that'll be a way to include them in it. Then the members in the group can take turns retelling the story and we would gradually fade the use of those visuals.
So, at this point they've gotten lots, and lots, and lots of exposure to the story and then I would obviously provide the visual support as needed, and then also verbal prompts and whatnot. But I would have the student retell the story and over multiple attempts, I would just decrease that support. So by the end, the students are all retelling the story on their own with as little support as possible. That might have to be adjusted for different students, but then they can listen to each other's stories and identify any missing elements and give each other feedback. Then it just becomes, it makes it fun, it keeps everyone engaged versus, "Oh, Johnny is telling his story now, so I'm not going to listen," but it keeps them engaged and it gives them more and more meaningful exposures.
So that's what we would do for step four. And then first step five, we get to jump into story generation. So we've done lots and lots of practice with story retell, but for step five, they get the opportunity to generate a parallel story. So we pull out a fresh graphic organizer. We can review all of the story grammar elements. If they don't need the visuals anymore, I'll just hide those, and then we can come up with our own story. And depending on the student's level, if they need a lot of support, we probably would just do one story as a group, come up with a story, fill in the organizer, and use the same kind of structure that I talked about in step four or if they're more independent, I might just do like round-robin where they can each tell their own story and just adjust the activity based on the level of support that they need.
So, yeah, that is our framework, and next week we will be talking about how to use a fiction article to work on narratives.

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Targeting Narratives with Literacy-Based Therapy: Preschool

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Narrative goals for preschoolers, like answering questions, sequencing, describing, and story retell, are well-supported by research: the ability to produce a narrative in preschool predicts reading comprehension years later, in fourth, seventh, and even tenth grade. Visual icons support retell early on, but research shows gradually fading those visuals across a group’s practice attempts helps build toward genuine, independent generalization.

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This Week’s Episode: How to Target Narratives with Preschoolers Using Literacy-Based Therapy

Evidence shows that using literacy-based therapy to target narratives with preschoolers not only makes sense, but it really helps to set them up for literacy success in the future.

That brings us to this month’s focus: embedding narrative-based skills. The focus of this unit with our Preschoolers will be— answering questions, sequencing, describing, and story retell. Are preschoolers ready to start telling stories? As I was digging through the research, I was more and more convinced that that is something that makes sense to work towards!

We’ll be doing that with the help of the book, Please, Puppy, Please, which is an adorable story about two kids who get a puppy.

Let’s dig into some tips that will make your therapy planning no so…RUFF! 🐶

References

Gillam, S. L., Olszewski, A., Squires, K., Wolfe, K., Slocum, T., & Gillam, R. B. (2018). Improving narrative production in children with language disorders: An early-stage efficacy study of a narrative intervention program. Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 49, 197-212.

Petersen, D. B., & Spencer, T. D. (2016). Using narrative intervention to accelerate canonical story grammar and complex language growth in culturally diverse preschoolers. Topics in Language Disorders.

Nathanson, R., Crank, J. N., Saywitz, K. J., & Ruegg, E. (2007). Enhancing the oral narratives of children with learning disabilities. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 23(4), 315–331.

Here’s what we discussed:

[03:13] Therapy Ideas for Step 1 (Pre-Story Knowledge Activation)
[05:15] Therapy Ideas for Step 2 (Reading)
[05:44] Therapy Ideas for Step 3 (Post Story Comprehension)
[07:20] Therapy Ideas for Step 4 (Skill Practice)
[08:10] Therapy Ideas for Step 5 (Parallel Story)

Want to hear more about this topic? Click here to see this month’s content!

Links Mentioned

– The SLP Now One-Page Literacy-Based Therapy Unit Planner
– Please, Puppy, Please by Spike Lee & Tonya Lewis Lee
– The SLP Now Membership (The WH Question Cards + Graphic Organizer that we mentioned are included in the membership!)
– Play-Based Therapy Toy Suggestions

Subscribe & Review in iTunes

Are you subscribed to the podcast? If you’re not, subscribe today to get the latest episodes sent directly to you! Click here to make your listening experience auto-magic and as easy as possible.

Bonus points if you leave us a review over on iTunes → Those reviews help other SLPs find the podcast, and I love reading your feedback! Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews,” “Write a Review,” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is.

Thanks so much!

Transcript

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This week, we are diving into all things preschool and all things narratives. So before we dive into the actual therapy plans, I just wanted to share a couple of the goals that we might be targeting when we're working on narratives with preschoolers. So we might be working on answering questions about a story sequencing or describing picture cards, or to actually retell a story. I'm not going to lie. I was thinking about some of my groups, and I wasn't sure if it would make sense for them. Are they ready to start telling stories? But as I was digging through the research, I was more and more convinced that that is something that makes sense to work towards, and of course we consider each step each student's strengths and needs, and reverse engineer where they are, and where we want them to go, and come up with sub-goals that make sense towards that final action.

But it's definitely something that, there's tons and tons of research out there. There was one study featuring small group narrative intervention with Spanish-speaking preschoolers learning English and that was by Spencer et al in 2019 and 2020. They were absolutely working on narratives with these preschoolers who were just learning English. There was another study by Spencer, Peterson, Slocum and Allen in 2015. They did large group narrative intervention with preschoolers, and they used WH questions as prompts. So that's, again, something we're doing with our preschoolers.

There's tons and tons of studies out there. There's more and more, so those were just a couple that came up. It was also super interesting because Snow et al in 2007 report that the ability to produce a narrative and preschool predicts reading comprehension performance in fourth, seventh, and tenth grade, so this is an important skill that these younger students can be working towards. If we can help them, it is absolutely an inappropriate goal. But again, we get to use our clinical judgment, but I think this was a helpful perspective.

So the book that we're using this month is called Please, Puppy, Please. It's about two kiddos who get a puppy and their experience with that puppy. So let's just dive into the literacy based therapy framework. Well, again, we'll just be focusing primarily on embedding narrative based skills in this unit. So we are working on answering questions, sequencing, describing, and then actually story retell. So for pre-story knowledge, we'll do a book walk, and we'll look at the cover, and flip through some of the pages to see what ... just to get an idea of what kind of schema the students have, or what kind of background knowledge they have around a puppy because that will significantly impact their ability to retell the story.
Have they had a pet? What's their experience with having a pet? Do they not know about having pets as cats and dogs? Do they have that vocabulary in terms of how we take care of them and all of that? If some of the students in the group don't have experience with pets, there's a number of different activities that we could do. So we could take a virtual field trip and have someone ... I'm sure there's videos of kids on YouTube showing them what chores they do to take care of their dog or their cat, and all of the responsibilities that that entails.

I have a really fun little, it's supposed to be a vet kit, but it has a little dog, and a carrier for the dog, and a bowl, and all of the supplies that you use. I think it even has a little ball, so we could do some pretend play around that, and then again, modeling the vocabulary and the concepts that they'll really need to understand that story. So those are some ideas for step one, and then it might ... I sometimes do an inferencing activity, so this might be appropriate for students who already have good background knowledge. If they all have pets, and they're really familiar with that vocabulary, I might take this a step further and use my story grammar icons to guess what the story will be about. So after doing the book walk, we can infer who the characters are, where the story happens, what the problem is, et cetera, et cetera, so that's something we can do there.

Then for step two, we would just read the book, and I don't add a lot of fluff here. I just do whatever I can to maintain students' engagement. So whether that's, if we're in person, having sit spots, behavioral reinforcement for attending to the book, or if we're doing teletherapy, we get to get a little creative. I might pause the book at times to make sure that the students are engaging.

Then for step three, we would dive into story comprehension. So based on that one study that I shared where they use WH questions as a support to start working on story retell, that was the Spencer, Peterson, Slocum and Allen 2015 article. I think that would be a great approach, and then we can still work on just the actual comprehension questions, and then we can fill that into the story grammar organizer, if that makes sense. I would use visual supports as needed, so we do have question cards for this unit. So if they're not quite ready for the more complex story, grammar components, we have some question cards. I really like using these because they're leveled, and they include the different question types like who, what, when and where, and then their level too.

Speaker 1: So one of the levels for the who questions only has people, and then the next step up would be having a person, a location and a thing. So they have to really understand what the question word means to pick the appropriate answer. They have a field of three choices, which helps with that errorless learning too. So I think that would be my step-wise progression. If they're not, not quite ready to answer those more complex questions, we would build up their comprehension questions skillset and spend some time working on that.

Then when it comes to the focus skill activity, so step four of the framework, I would ... We're focusing on narratives here today, so I'm not going to dive into all of the strategies. But if you want to listen back to the previous episodes, if the students have any grammar goals, I share tons of ideas and the grammar episodes, and the same thing for vocabulary, as well as just general strategies way back in February when we were just talking about the framework as a whole. But I would just embed all of those activities as needed, and then the generating the story could happen in step ... Yeah, that would happen in step four too. We have the option, just looking ahead a little bit, if we want additional generalization, we can take it to step five and have the students generate a parallel story. So maybe they can tell a story about one of their pets, or they can make up that pet. They can a imaginary speech therapy pet and make a story about that.

But in terms of step four focus, skill activities for narratives, the evidence really supports the use of visual icons, so that's something ... That's what I mentioned from the Spencer et al 2019, and then the Spencer et al 2020 article. So one of the examples that they gave was using the visual icons. So we can use those as a support and one important thing that was noted in that article and also Spencer and Peterson 2020 is that we use those visual supports to make abstract concepts more concrete. So we have those visual icons to make it more approachable, but it's ... We don't want the students to be dependent on those icons, so just something to think about, is just that we want ...

In the Spencer et al studies, they showed them icons while the story was being modeled and while the first child was retelling the story. But then for the second child, they only gave the icons, and then when the third child retold the story, they didn't give any of the icons. So over consecutive attempts of the retell across the group, they decrease those visual supports just thinking about generalization from the very start, which I thought was super helpful.

So we have a lot more that we could dive into when it comes to narratives and strategies, but that's what we've got for preschool this week and next week, we'll be diving into more strategies and really talking about how to target narratives with early elementary students.

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What Is Semantic Mapping? Examples + Free Template for SLPs

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This is a guest blog post by Monica, a school-based SLP, is all about how to use semantic mapping & the research behind it!

Do you have students with word-finding difficulties, but are not sure where to start?

Have you talked to their parents and teachers and they really want their student or child to be able to expand on their ideas, but they really struggle with vocabulary? Do you wish you could embed another vocabulary intervention into your existing narrative therapy? Semantic mapping is here to make your life easier!  Stay with me for how to follow EBP decision-making and to see if semantic mapping is a good fit for your students and their families. We’ll end with some therapy ideas for your sessions.

Thorneburg et al. (2000)

Semantic Mapping

What is Semantic Mapping? How do you do it?

Semantic mapping is also called semantic feature analysis. We all know the term from grad school as a common form of therapy for aphasia. Semantic mapping is when you list out features related to a word. It is most commonly done using interconnected circles and charts. Using this strategy helps students/clients map out how words are related to each other and develop a deeper understanding beyond labeling (Alt et al 2004).  Semantic mapping can include any words related to the target word to expand on knowledge about the target word. Examples of ways to expand on a word are: categories, physical attributes, actions,  origin, emotions, and background knowledge.

What is Semantic Feature Analysis?

Semantic mapping has a lot of different names. In the research, it goes by semantic mapping and semantic feature analysis. We all know it from grad school because it’s a commonly used therapy approach for aphasia. What does the research look like for the preschool to adolescent population?

Preschool 

Alt M, Plante E, Creusere M. (2004). Semantic features in fast-mapping: performance of preschoolers with specific language impairment versus preschoolers with normal language. Journal of Speech Lang Hearing Research. 407-20.

Preschool research for semantic mapping isn’t as easy to find. The research that is available points to SLI students having a more difficult time with semantic mapping than their peers.

The researchers suggested that these students are not just having a hard time labeling, but a deeper understanding of vocabulary.

Preschool students with SLI in this study had a more difficult time with actions than nouns.

School-Aged 

Best W, Hughes LM, Masterson J, Thomas M, Fedor A, Roncoli S, Fern-Pollak L, Shepherd DL, Howard D, Shobbrook K, Kapikian A. (2018). Intervention for children with word-finding difficulties: a parallel-group randomised control trial. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. 20(7), 708-719.

“Combining semantic intervention with phonological intervention led to on average 4x growth in the experimental group than the control group” (Best et al. 2018).

A randomized control study looked at word-finding therapy for children with language difficulties in a school setting.

Treatment was done once a week for six weeks individually.

Note: The children in this study scored within the normal range for comprehension and did not have a diagnosis of dyspraxia, autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, or global delay.

Adolescents 

Lowe H, Henry L, Müller LM, Joffe VL (2018). Vocabulary intervention for adolescents with language disorder: a systematic review. Int Journal of Language and Communication Disorders. 199-217.

Meta-analysis research for the adolescent population showed mixed results, but higher efficacy when using a phonological-semantic approach, with “outcomes that are better when the intervention is embedded in a wider language context such as a narrative approach.”

Overall, it looks like the research supports using semantic mapping when used hand in hand with phonological mapping. Embedding semantic-phonological mapping into a narrative approach may also improve outcomes. 

Client/Student & Family Values

What are some things we can think about after we’ve selected a therapy approach to use?

Let’s look at how to incorporate the client/client’s family’s factors like values and cultural/socioeconomic factors. Consider the research when making a recommendation about service delivery to the family and making a team decision.

“Students who received services through a collaborative model had higher scores on curricular vocabulary tests than did students who received services through a classroom-based or pull-out model. Although all three services delivery models were effective for teaching vocabulary” (Thorneburg et al., 2000).

Clinical Judgement and Expertise

After you have decided that it is appropriate for your client and the client/family agrees that it is  the best approach (maybe at an IEP meeting?), it’s time to use clinical judgment and expertise to think of the ways to best use this approach in therapy. Hang on tight, right after this, we’ll go over some therapy ideas!

Lowe et al. (2018) said that combining this approach with a phonological one and incorporating it in a narrative intervention has the most evidence behind it. Do you have students that would benefit from this approach? Semantic mapping lends itself to using a  lot of visuals and is easy to adapt to different learning styles and support needs.

Set up a way to take baseline data and monitor progress (keep in touch with teacher/caregivers to see if it’s working).

We love working on areas that can give you more bang for your buck and have areas of overlap.

How is working on expanding vocabulary and strengthening this skill going to increase access to the curriculum and participation in the classroom for this student?

Will working on vocabulary and expanding those skills also help with socio-emotional skills for your student/client? Would this help conversational skills and general functional communication?

Last Stop: Therapy Ideas

Use your existing narrative lesson

Incorporate semantic mapping by doing a book walk and map out new words before you start reading the book. You can also stop on ages to describe objects, characters, and setting using semantic mapping (e.g., what they look like, how they feel, and what they’re doing).

Make it functional

Pick places on their school campus or from home. Add sentence frames for extra support. Ask caregivers for ideas of things that they have a difficult time expanding on or things that they frequently have a hard time naming.

Collaborate

Work with teachers to do phonological-semantic mapping for upcoming themes and activities to increase participation in class. This would be a great time to incorporate actions as target items.

Use high-interest targets

Introduce new adjectives to talk about high-interest shows or movie clips to expand language.

Make a story with new words

Make a narrative or story using new words that you have targeted to increase word exposure. The more exposures to a new word, the better!

Don’t forget to use phonological mapping

Spell out the word and sound it out to include phonological mapping to help students learn the word. You can clap out the syllables, include a word that rhymes, or other words that start with the same sound.

But how do I know if it’s working?

Last but not least! Don’t forget to take the time to review if this approach is working by comparing it to that baseline data that you took. Best et al. (2018) showed that 6 weeks of intervention was needed to show a positive effect for vocabulary intervention.

References

Alt, M., Plante, E., & Creusere, M. (2004). Semantic Features in Fast-Mapping: Performance of Preschoolers with  Specific Language Impairment Versus Preschoolers with Normal Language. Journal of Speech, Language, and  Hearing Research>, 47(2), 407-420.

Best, W., Hughes, L.M., Masterson, J., Thomas, M., Fedor, A., Roncoli, S., Fern-Pollak, L., Shepherd, D. L., Howard, D., Shobbrook, K., Kapikian, A. (2018). Intervention for children with word-finding difficulties: A parallel group randomised control trial. International Journal of Speech Lang Pathology. 20(7), 708-719.

Cirrin, F.M., & Gillam, R.B. (2008). Language intervention practices for school-age children with spoken language disorders: a systematic review. Language, speech, and hearing services in schools, 39(1), S110-37 . 

Hadley, E. B., Dickinson, D. K., Hirsch-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2018). Building semantic networks: The impact of a vocabulary intervention on preschoolers’ depth of word knowledge. Reading Research Quarterly.

Lowe, H., Henry, L., Müller, L.‐M. and Joffe, V.L. (2018), Vocabulary intervention for adolescents with language disorder: a systematic review. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 53, 199-217.

Marulis, L. M., & Neuman, S. B. (2013). How Vocabulary Interventions Affect Young Children at Risk: A Meta-Analytic  Review.Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 3, 223-262.

Throneburg, Calvert, Sturm, Paramboukas, & Paul (2000). A comparison of service delivery models: Effects on curricular vocabulary skills in the school setting. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 9, 10–20.

FAQ

What is semantic mapping in speech therapy?

Also called semantic feature analysis, it involves listing out features related to a target word (category, physical attributes, actions, emotions, background knowledge), often using interconnected circles or charts, to help students build a deeper understanding of a word beyond simple labeling.

Does combining semantic mapping with phonological intervention improve outcomes?

Yes, research (Best et al., 2018) found combining semantic and phonological intervention led to roughly 4x more growth than a control group, and research with adolescents found stronger effects when semantic-phonological approaches were embedded in a broader narrative context.

How long does semantic mapping intervention typically take to show results?

A randomized controlled study (Best et al., 2018) found 6 weeks of once-weekly individual intervention was needed to show a positive effect on vocabulary outcomes.

Which service delivery model works best for vocabulary intervention?

Research (Throneburg et al., 2000) found students receiving vocabulary services through a collaborative model scored higher on curricular vocabulary tests than those receiving pull-out or classroom-based services alone, though all three models were shown to be effective.