Marisha: Hi there, and welcome to The SLP Now Podcast. I am so excited that Mikayla and Corey are back again for another episode, we really wanted to be able to dive into phonological awareness and get super specific and tactical with you guys and break down exactly what we can do to help our students with literacy deficits, and these ladies are going to break it down and help it make so much more sense. And if you think you've heard from Corey and Mikayla before, you have. They were here on the last episode, episode 27, so if you want to get the introduction to all things literacy, you might want to head to episode 27 to hear more about their story and how they got to this point, and then also all of the basics to get you a really nice foundation when it comes to literacy.

Marisha: And then just a quick recap in case you're wanting to dive into phonological awareness, Corey and Mikayla are from inaudible spark smarter intervention. And it's a Denver based educational consulting practice, and they are dedicated to getting SPLs the support they need to feel confident in structured literacy intervention. And if you want to hear more about their backgrounds, definitely check out the show notes or head to the last episode. But let's just dive right into all things phonological awareness.

Corey: Yay. That sounds super exciting. I'm so excited to get into this conversation. We love phonological awareness. So excited to get started.

Mikayla: Yes, this is one of my favorite topics, so I'm excited to jump right in.

Marisha: Yes. Okay. So before we dive into all of those practical tips, I'm curious, we talked about this a little bit last week. But maybe let's first just start with a quick recap of the triangle that you told us about, because I think that's a really helpful framework and a good reminder before we get super specific here.

Corey: Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of literacy development, so thinking about reading and writing skills development, we know that there are three core parts to the brain that really needs to come together to create efficiency and effective knowledge of reading and writing. And so those three core components in the brain start with the foundation, which is phonology or phonological awareness. So understanding that sound structure of the English language and how that comes together to create words. And then the second piece that next building block is orthography. So orthography is where we begin to tie visuals. So like the visual picture of a letter onto the sound that it makes. So actually recognizing an A as an A, and recognizing a B as a B would be that orthographic component. Also recognizing that that moves beyond just letters, but recognizing a word as a whole as a word, and just seeing a picture of those letters coming together is the next piece.

Corey: And then the third piece to that triangle, the top of the triangle is semantics. So semantics is really your comprehension of the word or the sentence or the passage that you're reading. And so when we think about those three neural processes coming together, we really like to look at that as a triangle. And we call it the literacy processing triangle. And we have to recognize that all three of those components have to come together at less than half of a second, to have fluency that we need in order to create comprehension. And so what we talked about last week was the critical role that speech language pathologist play in this, recognizing that you are so familiar with the phonology aspect or the sound structure of our language and you're also so knowledgeable in semantics.

Corey: And so really thinking about SLPs role here, it's so important and literacy, and so we're so excited to really dive in deep to that phonological awareness or that phonology section of the triangle because it's so critical in the whole of literacy development.

Marisha: Thank you so much for that breakdown Corey. And then now I'm curious, what is the SLPs role when it comes to phonological awareness?

Corey: Yeah. So I think this is really interesting because I think what we have to keep in mind in addition to the three part framework where we've got that literacy processing triangle, the other thing that we have to recognize in terms of research around reading development is that there's what's known as the big five in reading. And the big five is, phonological awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

Corey: So when we start to think about reading skills development and we start to think about where speech language pathologists fit into that big five, those five core components, we recognize that speech language pathologists can really help support development in phonological awareness, in that vocabulary development, in that comprehension development. So definitely when we think about those big five, potentially leaving out the phonics and reading fluency piece because that's potentially someone else's space. That's special education, general education, classroom teacher that's going to be on them. And so again, when we're kind of thinking about that triangle and then those five pillars, we start to look at where can SLPs help to support those abilities that may be falling flat. And so one of the things that we'd like to think about here is, one, we all want to help these kids.

Corey: We know that we went into this field because we want to make a massive difference. And so we need to start thinking about, whose role is it? Is it a speech language pathologist role or is it a special educator or a teacher's role? And one of the things that we have to recognize is that an SLP's role could simply be in training or providing support to the special education team or to the classroom teacher. When we think about phonology as a whole, we know that phonological awareness is a piece of that. The other thing that we would think about is articulation. There's a lot of pieces that fall into this. But when we develop phonological awareness, we are thinking about words without letters, right? We're just thinking about the sounds and how our language breaks down. And so oftentimes SLPs have the best training in phonological awareness, in understanding how language breaks down and how to correct those breakdowns.

Corey: A lot of times phonological awareness has gotten a lot of good press recently. And so there's a lot of teachers who are trying to incorporate this into the classroom. But what we see is we see that they're trying to train some basic skills like how to rhyme and how to break words into syllables, and how to do all of these different things, but they don't necessarily know how it pulls in. And when they start to recognize, uh-oh, Billy can't rhyme or uh-oh Billy can't tell the difference between the B and the V sound. A B and a V for example, or a TH and an F for example, we start to run into problems because teachers and special educators can recognize this breakdown, but we don't necessarily have the training, necessarily to understand how to correct some of those breakdowns. I think big picture and SLPs role could be one, training on the importance of phonological awareness, and then two, helping support when we start to see actual breakdowns.

Mikayla: Yeah. And that's so critical because we know that this phonological awareness skill set is a foundational building block in order for a student to be able to read and to be able to spell. So it's definitely a critical place that we need these students to be honing in on these skills and developing these skills. So SLPs offer a really unique skill set in order to support that.

Marisha: Yeah, that makes so much sense. And thank you for breaking that down for us. We've touched on this a little bit, but we're spread super thin, we talked about this last week and there are so many different skills that we want to target. So why is it particularly important to spend time focusing on phonological awareness? You mentioned that it's like a huge part of literacy and it's part of that triangle under the phonology element, but any other important elements that we would want to address or know about in terms of why it matters?

Corey: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a great question because even like I mentioned earlier, because there's been a lot of talk, because phonological awareness and phonology are being recognized in all of the research as being critical components of that literacy processing triangle, and of the big five that the national reading panel put together I think the year of 2000 when they put this huge Meta analysis of research together, that was great. And so that started to get incorporated. But what happened was there wasn't necessarily a connection of why it mattered or what it was helping to support. And so we know that it's a foundational building block because if students cannot begin to isolate the individual sounds that you're getting in your words, and start to be able to blend those sounds together or pull those sounds apart, we can't sound out words.

Corey: So for so long we've been telling students, we'll sound it out, sound it out. That's all well and good, but they didn't have the skills necessary to be able to sound it out for reading or spelling, because we weren't necessarily connecting. Why are we teaching how many syllables are in this word? Why are we teaching how many sounds are in this word? And so it's important that we're spending time focusing on that because we're asking students again and again and again sound it out, sound it out, sound it out.

Corey: Well, we have to help them understand if you understand the sounds of our language and you understand how they blend together to create words, and you understand how they pull apart to spell words, then we can start to ask them to sound things out without getting blank stares. Because so often we're I'm getting people, parents, and sometimes even educators asking students to sound out words like night, well you're trying to sound out words like night, and you've got a problem because what you have to recognize is that we only have three sounds, N, ight and that I sound is actually comprised of the orthographic pattern. I-G-H. So I-G-H saying I in that.

Corey: And so we have to start teaching students the background and the basis before we can start pairing those letter groups and pairing those orthographic patterns on. And ultimately that's going to impact comprehension as well, because sometimes we're getting breakdowns in different words in the way that we say it. So we talked about a potential phonology breakdown of not understanding the difference between TH and F. Well, if we don't hear or we don't perceive the difference or we can't produce the difference between TH and F, all of a sudden we can't pair an orthographic pattern appropriately. And the difference between the word thin with a TH and fin with an F, has a different semantic category, has a different meaning.

Corey: And so all of a sudden what we recognize is if we don't have that kind of core foundation, we are breaking down in that orthographic side, which is also that phonics kind of pairing as well as that semantics piece or that comprehension piece. So I think that's why it's so important to spend time there because it's really the bottom layer of this Jenga tower that we're thinking about, it has to be in place for these students.

Marisha: Yeah, I love that breakdown. And this reminds me a little bit of the conversation that we had last time. Like the example that you gave with night, like all SLPs know that that is three sounds, and we know a lot of these things that we take for granted, we think, oh, if I know that everyone must know that, especially the special education teacher. But sometimes it's not common knowledge, especially in the general education classroom. So we do bring that really unique skill set, and I think these types of conversations are particularly helpful in helping us identify our own superpowers in the areas that we are very knowledgeable about. So thank you for that breakdown and thank you for that reminder too, because I think that's so incredibly important.

Marisha: Just kind of a side note, we were talking about this before we went live. But we don't always feel like we have the knowledge or anything to contribute when it comes to literacy, but I hope that after Mikayla and Corey have broken this down for us, that you realize that you have so many skills as an SLP that make you an integral part of this team when it comes to helping students with literacy deficits. So if you don't have any other takeaways, I hope you walk away with that one, because that's such an important component. And I don't know if either of you have anything that you wanted to add to that?

Corey: I think that's so true. I just agree with that so much because I think the other thing that you may not recognize at this point is that you are a missing link to a lot of this. And I think not recognizing that the background and the training of other people is just so very different. And I think a lot of times we think that other people have more in depth knowledge of some of these things than they actually do. And so again, coming from this background and this training, we were sort of told, you need to hit on all of these things, but we weren't necessarily told why or how that contributed to the bigger whole. And so I think it's so important that as an SLP also just being able to make that connection for students like, hey, the work that we're doing in here, this is why we're doing it and this is how it impacts.

Corey: And also recognizing that sometimes you're having to fight for services a little bit for a student. You may have a student on caseload that this school is saying, well we're going to have to discharge them from services because there's no educational impact. Well hopefully this conversation can help you to see when we do have these breakdowns, there is an educational impact for sure.

Mikayla: Yeah, I think you absolutely hit the nail on the head because so often when we're working with SLPs we'll hear, well literacy's not my space. And it absolutely is and it absolutely can be. And like Corey mentioned in the last episode, when a student has inaudible students that have language disorders, there is a high risk of them having a literacy based disorder as well. So being able to take your amazing superpowers as you put it, and generalize those into the literacy space is going to do an amazing service for these students.

Corey: And it's not meant to step on special educators toes. It's not meant to do that. It's meant to supplement to augment, to really help support what it is that they're doing. And sometimes I think it's just about the communication of, hey, here's what I had and here's what I can offer, and tell me a little bit more about what it looks like in your session. And I think just opening that up so that they don't feel like, oh, this is my space for it, it's this tug of war of like whose space is at. Well really it's all of our space, let's just sit down and have a conversation about what I'm doing in my sessions and what you're doing in yours so that we can see where there's some give and take, because I get it as an SLP, you have a crazy caseload and you may have a number of different things that you're working on. So if there's anything you can hand off, great, let's just do some trainings so we can hand some of these things off, but make sure that they understand the why behind all of it.

Mikayla: That team based approach is definitely going to serve the students worlds better than having different segmented pieces. So the communication piece there is going to be huge.

Marisha: Yes. Yeah. Having that team approach is definitely huge. And I love all of the tips and strategies that you're sharing to totally make that possible. Because Mikayla said that some SLPs are saying that literacy isn't their space, and hopefully you've gotten enough information from here to realize that it is your space, you are helping with those building blocks. And then there's also information from ASHA saying that literacy is also in our space. So it's definitely in our scope of practice. It's not just some random new thing that's coming up, it's something that we definitely have the foundational skills for and ASHA supports that as part of our scope of practice as well. So we got a little bit of a different discussion. And so we'll bring it back to phonological awareness. But I do think that was super important just to bring home again. But can you help us break down the hierarchy of phonological awareness skills, what are we looking at here?

Corey: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to let Mikayla speak a little bit to this, but I think it is important to recognize that there is a very clear hierarchy of the way that these skills can come together, but also keeping in mind that you may have, this is kind of like a Jenga tower too. We like to use our analogies in things, and so phonological awareness skills even on their own can be a little bit of a Jenga Tower. And so really it is kind of figuring out where you may have holes and gaps, but I'll let Mikayla speak a little bit to that hierarchy of skills.

Mikayla: Absolutely. There is an absolute hierarchy to these. But I do want to note as well that sometimes students will have gaps that we'll talk about a little bit later, where even though we are teaching in a hierarchy and we're looking at it, sometimes a student will have a gap that falls further down on the hierarchy, but they're able to do more advanced skills. But we'll get into that later. I'm getting ahead of myself there. But in terms of the hierarchy, when we're looking at segmenting, for example, we will have a student first learn how to segment sentences before they move into syllables and sounds. So if the sentence is, the cat sat under the window, they're going to know that there's six words in that sentence before they're able to say, okay, the word under is two syllables, window is two syllables. And then even further that window has the sounds, w, i, n, d, ow there's five sounds.

Mikayla: And the same goes for blending. So being able to put words into a sentence, put syllables together. For example, if I gave the students the syllable can, did, what word is that? The word is candid. That's going to be an easier scope for them to accomplish before we then give them sounds and have them put together these sounds in a word, for example, s, l, i, p, er is the word slipper, that's going to be more advanced than putting together the syllables. So there absolutely is a hierarchy that we'll work through and we're teaching phonological awareness skills. And we'll look at all of that when we're testing phonological awareness skills as well.

Corey: And we have a resource that we use in terms of when we are getting a baseline assessment or when we are progress monitoring in really the way in which we're pulling those skills together. So one of the first things, and these are things that you guys are looking at too oftentimes in your assessments and in things like that, but for example, one of the first things we would want to look at is sentence repetition. Can they just a sentence back to you. That's going to be the first level of blending. And then after that we would look at sentence segmenting. So if you give them a sentence, can they tell you each of those words? So that's kind of like step one. And then the next step would be looking at rhyming skills. So the first one that we would want to look at would be can a student identify when two words rhyme.

Corey: So if you give them two words, can they say yes, those two words rhyme or no, those two words do not rhyme. Again, this is when we're starting to very basically play with sounds of words and recognizing those sounds of words. Can we hear it? After that rhyme discrimination, we want to look at Ryan production. Can they produce a rhyme for me. So if I give them a word can they produce a word that rhymes with that? So moving from that sentence level on to that rhyming or whole word level, then we would start to look at sound isolation. So can they isolate the first sound in a word? Can they tell you what's the first sound in bat? What's the first sound in thin? We can start to do that. And then we would look at final sound. So can we start to isolate the final sound in a word?

Corey: After that final sound isolation, then we might start looking at medial sound in a word, before we start breaking down to more of that isolation. But just being able to tell like what's the first sound, what's the last sound, what are the sounds that you're hearing? And then from there we'll kind of jump into what Mikayla was talking about even more, we want to start looking at blending and segmenting at both the syllable and the sound level. So again, we do have like kind of a step by step hierarchy based on norms of like when students should be developing each of these skills. But we can definitely attach a little chart for you guys for that hierarchy because there definitely, definitely is one.

Marisha: That's super helpful. And then do you have any norms in terms of what we should expect based on a certain age? Do we expect the students to have these skills a certain level in kindergarten, first grade, or do you have any broad expectations just to put a typical developing age on it?

Corey: Absolutely. So big picture, if you're working with students fourth grade and up, they should be able to do all of these skills. They should able to manipulate, they should be able to substitute sounds in words. They should be able to really understand the sound structure and be pretty fluent with that. Sometimes it still takes a little bit of work. I know when I was working at children's hospital, I worked under a neuro psychologist who would always like to give me a little quizzes. I felt like he was constantly assessing my IQ for me. But he would always give us like little like, say you know this word backward or what's sail backward? And so I'm kind of having to think like, s, a, il, il, a, s place.

Corey: But you would expect by fourth grade that students generally can have all of those skills. It might take a little bit of time. What I'm saying here is you might not have a huge automaticity, but definitely you should have those skills in place. And when we start working backward, if you're working with students who are in kinder through third or even kind of that pre-K through third, yes, there's definitely developmental norms that we would expect for each of those areas. So, typically when we're looking at pre-K, kindergarten, we want students to have at least about 80 to 90% accuracy in their ability to recall sentences for you.

Corey: So I know with a lot of our speech language students, they really struggle with repeating back sentences, but they should be able to repeat back four to five word sentences to you with accuracy. They should also have accuracy with rhyming. So being able to detect, rhyme, being able to produce rhyme, and they may start to be able to move into that phoneme isolation space. So that's kind of that beginning spot there. Once you get into first and second grade, you would expect that those skills that they should have already had mastered are clearly fully mastered, and at that point we start to expect that they can manipulate well, at the syllable level. So if we're asking them to blend syllables together, if we're asking them to segment syllables into each of their individuals, they should be able to do that with at least 90% accuracy at that age.

Corey: By the time, and I again, I kind of grouped first and second grade together, but also looking at second grade into third, fourth grade, that's when we should start to be able to also isolate and blend segment individual phoniums, individual sounds into their own pieces. So we're starting to get more and more granular as we're going and we expect them to have really that 90%. Sometimes I say 80, but really 90% is going to be showing mastery on something, I know as somebody who loves data, sometimes I only have time for five trials. So that's why I'll say 80% accuracy sometimes, but I just want to throw that out there. But that they should be showing you mastery of all the way into those sound level skills. And then by the time we're in fourth grade and above, again, we should be able to manipulate and we should be in all those higher level skills.

Corey: So in this chart that we're going to give you, it breaks that down for you and kind of what your expectation of what your norm is for each of those, so that you just have that and you can use it and you're not trying to like piece this together as I'm like talking about it.

Marisha: That is so helpful. I am really excited that we have like some more specific guidelines to go with, because we often don't get that. So I so appreciate that. That was amazing and I cannot wait to get that chart into people's hands. That is amazing. So anything else that you wanted to touch on when it comes to the hierarchy of these skills?

Corey: I don't think so. And I think part of the reason is because we know that these skills really do come in a hierarchy. And so obviously if we're working with kindergarten students, we don't want to be doing complex phonological manipulation skills expecting that they have these skills in place. But like Mikayla mentioned, I think a lot of times it's going to be important that we take a really holistic view of the fact that all of these skills are necessary to be able to read rights, and just manipulate, just spoken language as a whole we're going to need all of them. And so sometimes in terms of how we're working through these things, it doesn't necessarily look like that, it doesn't look like, okay, first we're going to hit this and then we're going to hit this. So we'll talk about that. That's why I say like, no, in terms of the hierarchy, yes, there definitely is one, but we don't have to hold ourselves with the, like, it must be this way. I must teach it this way.

Marisha: Okay. Awesome. That helps. So now let's get into some therapy. So what would this look like in terms of our sessions and what we're working on with students?

Corey: Yeah, I'll let Mikayla throw some ideas out for you.

Mikayla: Yeah. So I think at the easiest level it would definitely just be when you're with a student and you have a word that you're working on, pulling in some of those questions and those tasks like, hey, how many syllables are in this word or how many sounds are in this word? To start getting them segmenting that and being able to break them down. Or you can also flip that and say, I'm going to give you sounds. I know in the last episode Corey had said, you can give the student inaudible what word is that, if they're working on that c, sound? So definitely being able to do that. A fun way you can do it. This is getting a little bit more into executive functioning and working memory. I like to play a game sometimes with my students where I see how many words, I'm sorry, how many sounds they can hold on to and repeat back to me, and it doesn't have to make a word you can just give them inaudible Can you repeat them back? Kind of like the sentences that Corey mentioned early and repeating them back. It would be done the same way, but with sounds.

Mikayla: So those are great ways to pull them into your sessions. Another big thing that we want to make sure we're doing however, is helping them understand why we're doing this. Because if you're just asking them to break words into syllables, and you're not explaining why or you're not explaining why it's important to know how to rhyme, and why it's important to know that an F and a TH make different sounds. It's not going to land for your students and it's going to be really difficult for them to take these skills, buy into, wanting to improve these skills and then apply and generalize them as well.

Corey: Yeah, and I think that's so critical. And I think that's the missing component that I think can be really critical, as an SLP working with these students. Because again, like I mentioned before phonological awareness has gotten some good press recently in terms of how important it is. And so when I went to observe my own kiddos in their classes, what I saw was that teachers were doing a nice job of like, what's the word that rhymes with this? Or doing a nice job of how many syllables in this word? But I think what's going to be critical is starting to pair that to, if I'm asking you to count how many words are in a syllable, the reason that I'm doing that is because that's how we spell words. So for example, if we were targeting that c, sound in therapy again, and we wanted to do the word cupcake, okay, let's take that word cupcake.

Corey: How many syllables in cupcake? Two. All right, let's go ahead and just take a little whiteboard or take a piece of paper and let's make two scoops. So we call this our scoop spelling. So I'm going to make two scoops for cup, cake. And then what we can do is, okay, let's take the first syllable cup. How many sounds do you hear in cup? And have them just draw a little line, I hear, c, u, p in cup. What you can do then at that point is what's the sound we were working on today? Can they find it? Can they isolate? Where was that initial c sound? And they can be like, oh it's that first sound. You're right. That first sound in the word cupcake that we were just talking about is at the beginning of the word. Great.

Corey: Now let's move on to the second syllable. What's the second syllable? Cake. Okay, great. Let's go ahead and how many sounds do we hear in cake? C, a, ke. Okay, perfect. We're going to go ahead and make three lines for cake. Where do you hear the sounds? Oh, that first sound and that last sound were also that sound that we were targeting. And so what that can start to do is again, then we have to start to get into like, okay, well why do we spell it with an E at the end? Which is really not necessarily, unless you're diving into literacy as a whole thing, you don't necessarily have to worry about why, you can just say, oh, and there's an E at the end that doesn't say anything, how crazy is that? And that's plenty. But the good thing is, is that it's continuing to solidify what were you working on? What were you working on? What sounds were you targeting while also pulling out phonological awareness right into it so that they start to see, this is how we spell? That's why we care about it because this is how we spell. Or when Mikayla gave the example of like, why does it matter how many sounds I can hold on to?

Corey: Well, because when trying to sound out a word, we have to hold on to each one of those individual sounds, each one of those individual phonemes long enough to blend the whole segment together. And so oftentimes what we do and the reason that we need to teach students to blend sounds together and then to blend syllables together, is because when we've got multisyllabic words that we're trying to help support them with, we have to take the first syllable and we have to look at each individual letter or think about each individual sound. For example, if they were trying to read the word cupcake, they would have to hold onto c, u, p. What word did you just say? Or what syllable did you just say? Cup.

Corey: Okay, let's move on to the second one. C, a, ke. Okay. You just blended that together. What syllable did you just make? Cake. Okay, you told me cup, cake. What's the entire word? Cupcake. And so what we have to do is we have to make it clear when we are focusing on these phonological awareness skills, we are not doing it because it's just fun. We are not just doing it because we should do it, and somebody told us that it was one of the five core components of reading. We are doing it because it explicitly and directly correlates to reading and spelling. So I think in terms of what that looks like, it doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be something that you have task cards for.

Corey: I love some task cards. I absolutely love it. And I think also if ever you have mixed groups and you realize you've got a student who has phonological awareness struggles, you can definitely use those task cards that have the word that then breaks it down to like how many syllables are in this word. But I think you don't even have to do that, you can just use whatever it is that you're targeting, whatever words, whatever patterns you're doing, and just tie it in just like that. Like I'm going to pull one word out of this and let's do this fun little activity with it.

Marisha: Yeah. And I love that scoop spelling example. Because I have read some studies where they just use like blocks and other manipulatives instead of actually going into the orthography components. Is that something that you ever do or have you read anything about that?

Corey: For sure. We do that a lot. And a lot of times if you're not trying to target orthography at all, you don't need to. And in fact most of the time, we use, hold on Mikayla she's got all kinds of fun things. But yeah, we definitely used manipulatives instead. The one thing that we do want to do is, at the very least have the instructor then go then pair that orthography to it at the end. Like, great, we're just focusing on sounds but I just want to show you that connection because that's what's missing, is that connection between, okay, great, but why? And that's even something that perhaps you just shoot over to your special education team, or the classroom teacher is, here's this great strategy, this is how we focus on the sound level, the phonology level. Now they need to go tie the orthography in. But somebody has to connect to that because what happens is nobody else is and they expect students to pick up on that implicitly.

Corey: And our struggling students really struggle with implicit learning. So we can't just expect like, we taught phonological awareness, we taught all the letters. So now it all make sense. It doesn't make sense unless we show them. But yeah, Mikayla you can kind of jump into manipulatives.

Mikayla: Yeah. So I can explain a little bit about how we go from our phonological awareness task using those manipulatives to connecting it to written letters to words, to sentences. So whenever we get to the part of our lesson where we are going to do phonological awareness, we will use manipulatives. And I have like Corey said used a number of different things from Unifix Cubes to just these little tiny counter chips. If you're going to get those I recommend getting the magnetic ones because when a student knocks a hundred counter chips over onto the floor, they're a nightmare to pick up. But I've used all of those, and I just used different colored items so that students have something to move around and have a visual to tie those sounds too. So if they are trying to use counter chips to spell out or to represent the sounds in the word milk, again they'd have a different chip for m, i, l, k.

Mikayla: And then from there you can have them change different sound within a word by replacing the different chips and move through your phonological awareness activity. After we do that, we will move into our auditory drill, where we then give them a single sound and they need to come up with all of the different ways to produce that sound. So if it's, I, I know earlier Corey brought up the word night, I-G-H is going to make that I sound, but so will the letter I by itself. So knowing all of the different ways to produce that sound, or if it's the found A knowing A can say, A, AI, AY EA. There's a whole host of different things that will make that sound. And then we'll go into spelling and do the scoop spelling thing that Corey mentioned earlier, and we can say if we want to get even deeper into it, okay, if we're spelling cake with that A sound, that's where we'll get into more of those literacy-based rules to know which sounded to use.

Mikayla: I wouldn't go totally down that rabbit hole. We can save that for another podcast. But we do try to very explicitly connected for a student, how we're moving from using those little counter chips to putting that into word and then putting those words into sentences. Because oftentimes, like Courtney said, they don't just implicitly pick up on that. And as an instructor, that took me awhile to recognize, and students ask one day, they're like, I don't understand why we do this every week, and it was at that point I realized that I needed to actually very explicitly explain to them, we do the phonological awareness and our auditory drill activities because when you are spelling a word, that's the process your brain needs to go through to be able to register, okay what letters do I need to put into this word? inaudible they need to go in and how do they then put into correctly spelled word.

Mikayla: If you don't have manipulatives like that and you want to still do an activity where a student has that visual, there were days where I forgot my manipulatives or I didn't have them and I've used paperclips or I've used crayons or highlighters. Just something that the student can physically manipulate and have that colored visual, has been helpful enough for them to be able to do that task. You don't need to go and buy fancy things as much as we love the pretty Unifix Cubes and the little counter chips and kids like them. They're not necessary as long as you have something you can use.

Corey: And I think it's so important to just be thinking again about like, in your sessions. One, I think the most critical component is recognizing how this plays a bigger part. And then two, recognizing like with the orthography component or with understanding all the different ways we could get the I sound or all the different ways we could get the E sound, all of those pieces. Really what you can start to do is take a look at from your special education team or your classroom teacher, how are they teaching these things? Are there ways that you can just do that training of here's a great way to help your students with those literacy components specifically just in the general classroom? So this might be an opportunity where you start to teach the students a little bit how to do that just with words that you're using at the very least, breaking words into syllables and sounds and then blending syllables and sounds.

Corey: If I had to think about like the four key phonological awareness tasks, if I could not focus on any of the others, the four key ones that I would focus on would be syllable blending and segmenting, and phoneme blending and segmenting, because that's the literacy component. That's what we absolutely need. Now, clearly if you're working on articulation, if you're working on other things, there might be other times where you need to do more complex manipulation. But at the very least, trying to incorporate that into your session, and just using some of those strategies or those manipulatives or things to teach them how to do it. And then showing the classroom teacher, hey, if you're doing spelling word list, hey, if you're working on some of these things, here are some strategies that you can use as more of a push in model, or more of kind of that training support model to help make sure that some of these things are actually happening more in the classroom.

Corey: I would just say if you're working on some of these articulation pieces or things like that anyway, it's a great opportunity to bridge that gap and show them how it connects again to that literacy piece.

Marisha: I love the idea of sharing this strategy with teachers because I'm sure they'll be grateful for ideas to help support their students, but it also helps bridge that gap because sometimes the skills that we target in our speech, like they just stay in speech and the students don't know that they can use that to help them with their spelling. So I definitely think that talking to them about the why and discussing it there with the student is really helpful. But if you can share that with the teachers and have them use the same kind of language and examples around it, that's so incredibly powerful. I love that.

Corey: Yeah. We've even started using that as code practice for our parents. So trying to teach parents these things because a lot of times what happens is the things that you're teaching in therapy, it's hard because they don't generalize as quickly as they could because you don't have support in the classroom or you don't have support at home. And so we even started giving little spelling word list and things. So again, I know oftentimes in speech therapy you're giving a word list of different sound patterns that you potentially want targeted. For example, that might just be one type of home practice activity that you would give. What you could do is you could also just give a little phonological awareness task as part of that. So if we have a bunch of different words that are targeting that c sound, have the student go through and mark, we just make little grids, which again, happy to share with you. But little grids where they then need to mark each of the sounds that they hear in that word.

Corey: So again, they're just taking what they're doing and they're doing it at a deeper level. They're having more opportunities to look at that a little bit differently, and parents start to feel more empowered so that you don't get parents who are hoping to help, trying to help but are actually harming things. Like, for example, for us, when we have parents who are telling their kids sound out the word, sound out the word and we're like, ah, but actually don't because that's not a strategy that's working. This is just a way to help bridge the gap between classroom and home as well. So just keeping that in mind too.

Marisha: Yeah, so helpful. And I always curious too, because you mentioned like syncing up with what the special education teacher was doing. And I'm curious like let's say that the special education teacher is using a structured literacy approach and they're working through all of that orthography. What would be the best way if we're doing some of those phonological activities you mentioned, like the top four and you gave some ideas that we could embed that, but is there anything that we need to watch out for or anything that we could do to like have even more impact with what we're doing?

Corey: Yeah, so honestly I think there's a lot of value in doing this in one of two ways. So keeping in mind that there's not a right or a wrong way, I think there's two ways that you can do this and have it be really effective. So one of the things is if you do have a special education team who is working through a structured systematic scope and sequence, at the very least just knowing it is just saying ahead of time, like, hey, do you have an order in which you're teaching these phonogram patterns or these orthographic patterns that they're going to need to be looking at? Hopefully they do. Hopefully they're using an approach like that, but if so just kind of being connected on what that is, so that if there's ever a time where you have overlap and you are focusing on a specific pattern or a specific target for the kiddo, and it aligns or sort of overlaps with something that the special education teacher might be doing, that could be really great, you could even just ask the student like, hey, what did you learn about with miss or Mr. So, and so like, what was that pattern? Tell me a little bit about it. And see if you can pull in some words that would also target what you're doing.

Corey: So if you're working on a language component and you have a vocabulary word that kind of aligns with that pattern, great. Or if you're working on articulation for example, and you have a word that might align with that pattern. Great. That's awesome. That's great. That's also a lot of work. I get that. That's like, yeah, I don't have time for that. No judgment here, I completely understand that. So if at all possible, that's awesome. Like if everybody can kind of get on the same page, that's great. If that's not possible, then I think the other opportunity that you have here that you have to recognize is that even if you're out of sync with the scope and sequence that the special education teacher is teaching, you are still helping to generalize these skills.

Corey: I think too often using kind of that Orton Gillingham approach, what happened is we got so stuck on kids can only read these words and they can only practice these words and they only focus on these words, that they didn't see how it applied to any other context. And so I think it's important to even recognize that even if you have no communication with the special education team at all, which I don't recommend, but I know it's a reality sometimes, is just continuing to do it with the words that you are using, recognizing that some of the things might be beyond the scope or the pattern that the child knows, but that they'll start to see, hey, you may not have learned this yet, but I'm just exposing you to it. I'm giving you exposure, so that at a time when that becomes more relevant, you're like, oh yeah, I know that. I remember that.

Corey: And that offers significant value too. So I don't ever want people to think like, Oh, if I'm not completely in sync with my special education teacher, I'm doing kids a ton of harm, no, that's not necessarily the case at all. Just use your words, use your targets and see when and if you can kind of pull some of these things in.

Marisha: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And thank you for breaking that down. And then I'm also curious in terms of like you gave us this hierarchy and for some of the examples, because it sounds like students first learn to identify, like it's easier to isolate the first sound in a word and then it's second easiest to do the final sound and the middle sound or the medial sound is the hardest. So if we're embedding this into our therapy, should we just focus on the first sound until they get that or is it okay to do like first and final or should we do all three altogether? Any tips and suggestions in terms of that implementation going down the hierarchy?

Corey: Yeah, I think it depends on the age of your students really and who you're working with. So if you're working with a kindergarten group, we wouldn't necessarily be expecting them to be able to isolate each of the different sounds in words and being able to recognize that. And so in that case, you do want to kind of use that hierarchy as a benchmark for what do I need to be teaching? Like, what are the skills that they should have? We don't want to work on things that are developmentally inappropriate clearly. But, if you have students who are in that even second grade and up, by the time they're in second grade and up, they really should be able to identify individual syllables, individual sounds and words. At that point, it's okay to start requiring more from them.

Corey: It's a little bit tricky because you don't want to overwhelm students and so it's a little bit student dependent on what that looks like. But for example, in our curriculum, one of the key pieces that we always work on is phoneme manipulation. So like changing sounds. So for example, Mikayla gave the example of milk, okay, what if we change the first sound in milk to s. Great, now we have silk. And we can kind of do some of those things. So we always work on phoneme manipulation, even though it's the most complicated task that a student will have.

Corey: What we can start to do though is then work backwards to fill in any of those other gaps. So I think what's important here is that yes, you could foreseeably work on all of those things at once. Or if you've got groups of students, you might have students working on different pieces, it's helpful for them to see how it all comes together. When we work too long on one isolated skill, they get kind of stuck. And again, not seeing how this fits into the big picture. And so it's good for them to have exposure to all of those different pieces to see this is just how we play with language, we're just going to play with words a little bit here. It's really important.

Marisha: Yeah, that makes so much sense. Thank you for that. And then, let's see. I know there's so many variables here, but in terms of working through the phonological awareness hierarchy, I know we have the development and we expect those skills to be in place around fourth grade. But I'm curious, how long do you end up working on that? What ages do you work through? And if you start working, hopefully we're working with these students before fourth grade. But I'm just curious in terms of the timing and how long we would expect to work on a skill if we're working on that rhyming, how long do you typically spend on that or if you have a range before a student masters that?

Corey: Yeah, and that's so depends. It really depends on the student. I think what I always keep in mind as a clinician and an educator is, what is the end goal? So I don't want to teach rhyming just for the sake of rhyming. We understand that this is kind of a foundational piece. But the reason that we teach rhyming is to help make spelling hopefully a little bit more fluent for students, or reading a little bit more fluent for students so that they can start to recognize some of those patterns. And so I think there's two parts to answer your question. I think one, we don't want to spend more time than we need to, if the outcome of phonological awareness is met. So the reason again that we're going to teach phonological awareness is because one, that's how we make sure that we're articulating properly, that we've got all of the individual sounds and the words have come out correctly.

Corey: So if you've got a student who is struggling with that articulation or production piece, you need to work on these things as long as you need until you've got adequate performance on the outcome measure. So phonological awareness in itself is not the outcome, the outcome is that we can produce sounds with intelligibility or the outcome is that we can blend sounds together when we're reading, to be able to read appropriately or we can segment sounds appropriately so that we can spell correctly. So I think the first piece of that is I would never work on a goal, if the end goal has already been attained. So if they're already articulating appropriately, and they can blend patterns together long enough to read or spell, that's going to be the key piece. If you have a student who doesn't have these individual phonological awareness pieces in place and they continue to struggle with articulation, reading or spelling, then it's one of those things that you sort of need to work on it as long as it takes, to get the desired outcome.

Corey: For us, I know Mikayla you might be able to speak a little bit to this too, but in terms of how long it takes, it's so student dependent and some of our students continue to struggle with it longer than we would like to see. But I would say typically students once they've been exposed to it, can start to get the gist or the pattern of this within about three to six months of ongoing therapy and exposure to it more or faster if you can get the teacher on board, and even faster if you can get parents on board. But I would definitely not spend a ton, a ton of time focusing on each individual piece unless you can see how it's specifically impacting the outcome that it's hindering.

Mikayla: Yeah, I would agree with that three to six months typical range. Again, very student dependent, and Corey you can talk maybe more to this as well, but I'm typically seeing if it's taking a student a lot longer than that, it might be more of an issue or at least worth looking into the issue of a working memory or attention concern as well. Especially if they've had that explicit instruction from me, from their teacher, from any other supports and then parents, that's always a red flag for me that's inaudible going on as well. But yes, definitely around that three to six months. And then we're also really careful when Corey said that we will absolutely hit on this as long as it takes to get students that end goal.

Mikayla: If we have a student that's coming in, like you said before, hopefully we're seeing them before fourth grade, but if I have a seventh grader coming in, I'm going to be a little bit more careful about how I introduce some of these tasks, especially ones like rhyming because while they can still be important to get that desired outcome, we want to make sure that the students feel like they're being respected as well and that they're not doing baby work as often or not as often we are very careful, but as is often a concern.

Marisha: Yeah. So helpful. And I think that I really love how you focused in on the final outcome, because no one's going to get a job because they can rhyme. But being able to read and spell will definitely impact that. So I think that is such a great reminder, because we're wanting to embed that and share that with our students as we're going through these tasks, and that's what we're all ultimately working towards. So that is an amazing reminder. And then just one last question because you've been talking about this structured literacy program and I think you've kind of alluded to the answer through your different examples here. But does an SLP need to use a structured program or do they have to have a really expanded set of materials to teach phonological awareness correctly?

Corey: So yeah, I'll let Mikayla talk about this. But this is crazy because I've heard this come up a lot. So it's an interesting point.

Mikayla: Yeah. So I would say no. If you are looking again to pull in the full literacy, processing triangle and hit everything, that's where we much more require a structured and systematic approach. But if you are kind of hit on phonological awareness as its own literacy sprinkle, and pulling it into your sessions, it can be so much more off the cuff, it can be just a verbal response with the students. So asking them, okay, you're working on the word milk again, how many sounds are in there? Let's change m to s. And just going off of that without any of those fancy materials or a complete structure program.

Corey: I think what is important with considering a structured program, I think the benefit to that is that we're not leaving things out. Right? So I definitely agree with Mikayla, we do not need to use a structured program. We do not necessarily need to use structured materials. But what we do need to know is we do need to have some type of baseline or some type of assessment that helps us to recognize where those holes and those gaps are occurring. Because otherwise, what sometimes will happen is, as we mentioned earlier, you'll have a student who's struggling either with articulation, who's struggling with reading, who's struggling with spelling. And we know that we have a phonological awareness breakdown, but we're not entirely sure where it is. That's where having a hierarchy and recognizing that there are distinct categories of phonological awareness are so important.

Corey: And so when we're looking at assessment and we're thinking about, for example, all the comprehensive test of phonological processing is a really great measure. I absolutely love it. I think it gives a ton of very valuable data. But what it doesn't do is it does not break those phonological awareness skills down for you very far. And so you need to recognize that you may need to do some assessment and take some data to figure out from that hierarchy, and that sort of systematic building, where are the holes and the gaps. So if we look at that Jenga Tower of phonological awareness skills, where are those? And we can just fill them in, we don't need to build from the bottom up like we would need to do with a full structured literacy or Orton Gillingham approach to literacy, phonological awareness is a little bit different in that.

Marisha: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that's true for anything that we do. We want to have data to show why we're working on the skills that we're working on, and use that to support. And then we also need that to make sure the students are making adequate progress and that what we're doing is working. So that makes a ton of sense. And you're speaking to my database, clinician heart. I wanted to share that.

Corey: It's just so important again, to make sure that we keep in mind, like we've reiterated a few times here, phonological awareness is not your end goal. So we want to one, make sure that our phonological awareness scores are going up, that we're targeting the right places, but that ultimately that's moving the needle on whatever the end goal is. Because, we don't want to focus just on data for like this one point and be like, yoo-hoo we made 100%, but my articulation's still awful, or but my spelling is still awful, then it's like, well, great, we targeted the underlying concept and it didn't help support the end goal. So we've got to focus on both of those data points.

Marisha: Yes, I love it. Well. Thank you Corey and Mikayla so much for breaking this down for us. If you want to find any of the resources that we mentioned today, you can find them @slpnow.com/28. And thank you again. I so appreciate you sharing all of your time and expertise with us.

Corey: Of course. Thank you so much for having us.

Marisha: Hi there, and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. Today we have Corey and Mikayla here to help us dive into all things literacy. You guys have been asking a bunch of questions about this, and I feel like Corey and Mikayla are the perfect people to break this down for us.

Marisha: So Corey and Mikayla are a dynamic duo, and they are determined to get effective and accessible literacy intervention materials into the hands of struggling students everywhere. They have a really unique setup. They have a educational consulting practice in Denver, Colorado. They work with SLPs and educators to help them feel confident about their structured literacy intervention, and they also work students in their clinic as well.

Marisha: So a little bit about Corey. She is a data driven and analytical educational therapist and diagnostician. She's deeply passionate about helping struggling readers close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. She spent over 10 years working at leading research and clinical institutes, including Johns Hopkins University, Children's Hospital Colorado, and the University of Denver before opening her own private practice, Ascend Learning and Educational Consulting in 2015.

Marisha: Then Mikayla joined the Ascend team in 2017 and has been working as an educational therapist for the last two years. She's a passionate and eager professional with a background in psychology and special education. Her passion is in helping kids see that they are helping of learning and helping them change their life.

Marisha: So they clearly have a really unique set of experiences and I can't wait for them to share all of this expertise. Also in addition to all of the private practice work and consulting they do, they work all over the country with online professional development training programs. We'll share links in the show notes to find out more about all of the amazing things that they have going on.

Marisha: So without further do, Hi Corey and Mikayla.

Corey: Hi.

Mikayla: Hello.

Marisha: How are you? Amazing. I cannot wait to dive into this topic. Before we get into all of the nitty-gritty, all the tips and tactics that you have for us, I'm really curious. How did you guys, both of you, come to learn so much about this topic in particular? I'm really curious about a little bit of your story.

Corey: Absolutely. So first of all thank you so much for having us. We are so excited to share all things literacy, because Mikayla and I are both so passionate about this, and especially passionate about the role that SLPs play here. So first of all, thank you.

Corey: So in terms of how I got into this field. I actually started out my career working with students on the autism spectrum at Johns Hopkins University. That really sparked my love of language, and development in children as a whole. From there I moved onto working in neuropsychology, so working specifically with neuropsychologists with students who had any number of academic, language, social-emotional struggles. And I loved that so much. It was so interesting seeing just the different backgrounds of students and how those would come together, what assessments showed you about what they needed. From there I started to recognize, wow, I can see the profiles of these students. I can see where there are holes and where there are gaps, but I'm really curious about what it looks like in terms of actually closing those gaps and helping those students make real measurable gains and differences in their lives.

Corey: So from there I transitioned into the Learning Services Department at Children's Hospital Colorado. We were so lucky to be in an umbrella with a learning support team, a speech language team, and an audiology team. So we were really under this big umbrella which gave me this really unique and interesting opportunity to get to work closely with our speech and language team to see how we could support these students together who had learning issues. And I started to see there's major overlaps, specifically in the area of literacy, although it expands way beyond that. But specifically literacy in terms of what does that look like from a reading interventionist or a learning therapist role. And what does that look like from a speech language pathologist role. I just love it.

Corey: I absolutely loved my time there and I wanted to have the opportunity to work more closely in this multi-disciplinary way. So ultimately that's where I jumped into private practice. I have just absolutely loved continuing to learn about literacy. I've taken every training under the sun, from Orton-Gilllingham, to Lindamood-Bell, to just about anything I could get my hands on, because I was so fascinated in how the brain developed literacy skills. So that's my background. That's how I really moved from the beginning to the end of where I'm at in my career right now in terms of literacy.

Marisha: That's amazing. Such a unique set of all these different skills. And then what about you Mikayla.

Mikayla: Yeah. So when I was in school. I had a background, like you mentioned before, in psychology and special education, and knew that when I graduated I wanted to do something with children. I've wanted to help kids ever since I was a child myself. But I really didn't know exactly what that was going to look like. So I did few different things and worked in a couple of different roles in classrooms and with speech language pathologists, and tried to get any experience I could to help me narrow it down. We joke that this opportunity kind of fell out of the sky a little bit. I just decided I was going to move to Colorado, and went searching for an opportunity and for a job, and ended up finding Ascend and finding Corey.

Mikayla: When I first spoke with her I disclosed that I didn't have a background in literacy intervention. I knew I wanted to work with kids. I had had some experience in an educational setting. But I didn't have any literacy background. But she trusted me and I came onto the team and got all of my training through her and her expertise, and all of the knowledge she's built up with all of her amazing experiences, and all of the amazing roles she's held in the past. I jumped in. I did my research, and I started working with students. And I've been working here for the last two years as an educational therapist, as well as a part of our team supporting SLPs in that online professional development space. And have really started to jump into the executive functioning space and how it relates to literacy as well as all of the private practice pieces that come with that.

Marisha: Oh, that's amazing. You mentioned executive function. We've been getting a ton of questions about that. Maybe we need to talk about that more in another episode. How interesting. But since we're focusing on literacy today, I'm really curious. I talk about literacy based therapy all the time. I love using books in therapy. But when it comes to the core foundations of literacy and when you're looking at orthography and all of those different components, I know, at least when I was first starting out, I was a little bit unsure of what my role was in that. So can you help break that down for us a little bit?

Corey: Absolutely. So I am, again, so passionate about specifically SLPs and their role in literacy, because I think when we can fully understand how the reading and writing brain works, we can really understand how the background and training that SLPs have supports this development just incredibly.

Corey: So really when we think about how the reading brain works and what the neural processes are in order to be able to read, spell, write with competence we have to look at three specific areas. I like to look at this as a literacy processing triangle. That's really what it's been known to be called, at least in our field over here in the learning world, that literacy processing triangle. It's made up of three distinct components.

Corey: The first piece is phonology. That's kind of one of those foundational building blocks. So we know when we think about core components of literacy development, phonological awareness skills is a huge one that we look at. And it's really tied into the phonology development, so understanding of the sound structure of our English language.

Corey: The second piece that's really important, that's kind of the next building block there, would be orthography. So orthography is being able to see and look at letters or symbols and recognize what that letter is. So we've created the little picture that we've decided to call an A, and we need to be able to make that recognition. So that's what the orthography is, is really the sight piece of that processing triangle.

Corey: And then the last piece is semantics. So semantics, clearly as you know as a speech language pathologist, is the understanding or the comprehension of the language. So really this marriage of the sounds, understanding the sounds, understanding the pictures or seeing the visual component, and then being able to create comprehension off of that. So I always like to use the word "bat" for example. When we're looking at the word bat, we know we have distinct sounds, b-at, that are coming together. We know that we have those distinct letter patterns. You could look at a B. You could look at an A. You could look at a T. And we need to make that connection between the orthography and the phonology, so the sound and the symbol. And then we need to be able to make a comprehension out of that. So we need to recognize that "bat" is a concept that I know, and it could either be a baseball bat. It could be a nocturnal flying animal. But we need that whole connection to come together.

Corey: And it has to come together really quickly. So really it has to come together in less than half of a second in order to be able to read or write with fluency that would be necessary for comprehension or composition that is up to grade level standards at any age. So I think understanding that that's the neural process that has to happen. When we really break that down we recognize that SLPs have a really critical understanding of phonology, of the sound structure of our language. That's what you work on. That's what you target. Also you have a really critical understanding of semantics and creating comprehension from the oral language. Because essentially when we're reading we are just creating oral language in our head. Same thing when you're writing. You're just taking oral language and putting that down onto paper.

Corey: And so understanding that, SLPs understand more about phonology and semantics than most people who are actually working in this field. As a special educator, as a reading interventionist, we don't receive training or background on how to develop phonology, how to develop semantics. So what that leaves us with, is it leaves us with this understanding of the orthographic piece, the letters. A lot of people will say, "Oh, phonics instruction," and things like that. That's what's going on. That's what the special educator does. That's great. And in that background we got training on orthography, but nothing else.

Corey: So I think it's really important to recognize SLPs can absolutely play this critical role in making that whole connection come together. Whether that's working directly with students or whether that's providing professional development or support to your special education team to help them better understand how they can further develop that semantic piece or that phonology in the work that they're doing. So that's my long-winded answer to your question there.

Marisha: That is so incredibly helpful. I'm just picturing that triangle in my head. I've heard you present on this before but the first time you presented on it, I was like, "Oh, I've got phonology." And orthography, you're right, was a little bit trickier. And then you mentioned semantics. I'm like, "Oh, we're got this." So they are definitely areas that we're super familiar with, and it's a matter of then just figuring out how we can leverage that to work with students who have literacy deficits. And then also figuring out how to provide support to the team. That's such a helpful perspective. I'm really excited to be able to dive into that a little bit more.

Marisha: But before we talk about what we can actually do, because I'm sure there's different profiles that we see with students who you are seeing for literacy support. And then how do you go about identifying that core deficit to figure out which approach makes the most sense? And how to start navigating that all together?

Corey: Yeah. I think you make a great point here, and I wanted to create just a little bit of clarity here too. Because I also realize one of the things that I said in terms of an SLPs role in literacy, one of the things that I think is important to think about as we start thinking about core deficits, is that really SLPs as special educators are working with students who this process isn't coming naturally. So typically what we're going to be doing is we're looking at that literacy processing triangle, and we're recognizing that students who are not gaining literacy skills, so either reading or writing, at a level that's not consistent with their peers, have a breakdown somewhere.

Corey: In that literacy processing triangle something is not connecting. So it could either be phonology. It could be orthography. Or it could be semantics. But there is a break somewhere in there. Or we might have some students who have some foundational skills in each of those areas but the fluency, so the act of that coming together in less than half of a second, is not necessarily happening. So what we're doing in special education, in speech language pathologists' role in the schools and privately, is we are working with the students who have those breakdowns. If you have students who are reading and writing on grade level, clearly they don't have a breakdown. That whole system's running smoothly. We're not working with them.

Corey: So you bring up this question about identifying a core deficit. We've got two ways in which we can do that. We can do it through curriculum based measures or we can do it through standardized measures. I'll let Mikayla speak to the curriculum based measures and how we can start taking a look at identifying the core deficit that way. And then I'll chat a little bit about standardized measures that we can use as well.

Mikayla: Absolutely. So like Corey said, we have these two different types of assessments that we'll use in order to figure out where that deficit and where that breakdown in the triangle is falling. When we have a curriculum based measure we will look at a number of different things, like their chronological awareness, which we will get more into later on. We'll look at their phonics and we'll look at their comprehension to see, Okay, when we're looking at that triangle are they breaking down in any of these areas?

Mikayla: And now a curriculum based measure is great because when we're using a standardized measure which Corey will bring up in a second, we can only do those every so often. They have time constraints on them. But if you're looking to see if what you're doing is making progress from week to week and more frequently, we can absolutely be using a curriculum based measure. So progress monitor every few weeks or every month to see where are students falling in terms of the instruction they're receiving. And where can we put more supports to fill in those gaps as we go.

Corey: And then in terms of the standardized measure typically what we're doing is we're looking at assessments that are going to specifically target those core areas as well. So we're looking at specific assessments to target phonological awareness or phonology. We're looking at orthography measure. So usually that's like a phonics based assessment, and seeing like, "Hey, if we give you a list of all of the different letters and sound patterns, can you provide the sounds that that pattern makes?" And then some type of semantics assessment.

Corey: So in the terms of literacy we're usually looking at reading comprehension because that's kind of the highest end pillar of what we're looking at with the reading. So in terms of assessment, we typically like to give a battery that contains both the curriculum based measure as well as the standardized measure. In the beginning we might look at something like the CTOPP, so the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, as a really great way of looking at phonological awareness. We might also look at the Phonological Awareness Test, which is another great one, the PAT. There's a number of really great ones out there. I know a lot of people have said, What about this one? Or, what about that one? There's a lot of great phonological awareness tests out there. It doesn't matter as much what you're using as long as you're getting some baseline of how is this student doing in terms of their understanding of the sound structure of the language.

Corey: One of the things we love about curriculum based measures is that you can start to dive down a little bit deeper sometimes that you'll get with like the CTOPP give you kind of a big picture. You'll see, Oh, phonological awareness is breaking down but I don't know exactly where. Those curriculum based measures can help you pinpoint exactly where it's breaking down.

Corey: Then we can also take a look at the orthography piece. So again that phonics based piece. And you can do that through a number of different assessments. So a word identification and spelling test. You can do that through, again, a phonological awareness test also has an orthography component which I absolutely love. So that's something that you can do. And then you can also use curriculum based measures there of just giving letters and saying, Okay, do you know what these say? Sometimes that's something that's more appropriate for a special educator to be doing. So this is where you might have that multidisciplinary approach whereas a speech language pathologist you're looking at the phonological awareness piece. And then you're handing off that orthography piece to a special educator, which is great too. And it's great to have that consistent communication.

Corey: Then in terms of reading comprehension, we like to have a standard, formal measure of reading comprehension that we can look at to see how our student's performing in comparison to their peers and their aged based buddies in the classroom. But then also having a curriculum based measure so that we can start to recognize if comprehension is breaking down, is it breaking down because they can't identify main idea in detail? Is it because they can't make inferences? Is it because they have limited vocabulary? We have to start to recognize what's causing the breakdown. So that's another reason why we like to use those standardized assessments as well as the curriculum based measures.

Corey: So it's important as a speech language pathologist, one, if you're going to be working with literacy, to understand where literacy is breaking down. But in addition you may have some students who come to you, and come to your caseload, and they're primarily concern is actually language, right? That's ideal as a speech language pathologist to be working with students whose primary concern is language. And if that's the case, what we don't want to do, is we don't want to pull too far away from what you're already doing and we want to figure out how we can start to just incorporate little tidbits of literacy in. Because we know that students how have language based disorders are at a very high risk of having literacy based disorders as well.

Corey: So it's important to recognize as you're working through this multidisciplinary team, if you've got a student who's struggling with both language and literacy skills, we need to really start looking at what's the bigger issue. So that you can determine when you're working with these students, are you trying to pull a special educator into what you're doing? Or if literacy is the primary concern and there's just some little hints of language struggles, then can we offer that special educator more support on that end?

Corey: And really want we can do if we're using those standardized assessments, is we can see is semantics is really the biggest hole, and the biggest gap. And you have maybe a little bit of difficulty in orthography and a little bit of difficulty in phonology. Then that's a language kid. That's your primary language kid. Those are the ones that you see most often. If we're seeing that orthography is the primary deficit, then that's somebody who's going to be best supported by your special education team that you can potentially offer some support on how can they amp up their instruction in phonology and semantics. If you've got a kid whose phonology is the primary deficit, then it gets to be a little bit interesting. We can talk more in the next episode about phonological awareness, and when you've got a kid whose primary deficit is phonology who's the best person to support and what does that look like.

Corey: So, again, there's my super long response to identifying a core deficit.

Marisha: That's so helpful, and I am so excited to dive into all of the things that come after this. But I was curious. Do guys typically used a curriculum base measure for the orthography component. Because you mentioned that some of the phonological awareness assessments, you mentioned that sometimes they look at orthography. Is there anything in particular that you would recommend for that? Just so we know what we might be looking for in a special educator's assessment.

Corey: Yeah, absolutely. So we do have a baseline assessment that we provide, and we're happy to share that with your listeners just so they can kind of start to get an idea of what are the things that we're looking at and what are the umbrellas that that fall under. When we developed our baseline assessment we tried to make sure that we had a very clear picture of here's the phonological awareness piece to that triangle. Here's the orthography piece. Because really you just need to know that students have sound-symbol correspondence. So it's really just knowing all of your letter patterns and what sounds would they make.

Corey: So in terms of standardized assessment, we use the word identification and spelling test for that. But we have a curriculum based measure that works really well for that too, if people don't have access or just want to give something to their special education team and they don't have a standardized measure. We don't want you to skip it just because you don't have access to it. So that's why we created our curriculum based measure as well.

Marisha: Yeah. That's so helpful. And I've found that a lot of general education classroom teachers are giving these types of assessments, especially in the early grades. So it's just knowing what to look out for, or even just what to ask for if you're curious about that. Because a lot of this data is being collected all of the time, so that would be super helpful.

Marisha: I'm also curious if you have any favorite assessments for the comprehension component. Because I know as SLPs we got lots of assessments that look at that. I was just curious if you had any favorites.

Corey: Yeah, so I think there's two things that we need to look at when we are looking at comprehension. Because what we have to recognize with that semantics piece is that you're looking at oral comprehension. So what does a student understand when the information is provided orally. So I know a common one that's given from SLPs is the CELF, and they've got that Understanding Spoken Paragraphs, which is helpful. We've need to have that information to know what happens when we don't have to read. And then we also need to have a reading comprehension measure.

Corey: So here in our clinic what we use, we use the WIAT. People call it all kinds of different things, but the Wechsler Individualized Achievement Test, because it has both a listening comprehension section as well as a reading comprehension section. Another great one is the Tested Integrated Language and Literacy Skills, the TILLs, is a great assessment that will give you information on both the oral comprehension and the reading comprehension.

Corey: Whatever assessment that you're giving, of if you're giving a battery of assessments and you're trying to pick from what you have available to you, is just making sure that you have that measure of both oral and reading comprehension. Because we need to see if there is a breakdown between the two. And that's another way to see which is primary. If we're thinking about core deficits, if a student's listening comprehension is stronger than their reading comprehension we know we have a reading gap that we need to fill. If a student's reading comprehension is stronger than their listening comprehension, we've got a language gap that we need to fill.

Corey: So in terms of the semantics piece, I think you can use what you have but just make sure that you have a reading comprehension measure and a oral comprehension measure.

Marisha: Yeah. That's so helpful. I'm really glad that you shared those specific tests to look out for. Because again those were tests that either we're administering or the special education teacher, or maybe even the school psychologist, is giving. So a lot of that information is already out there. We just need to know what to look for. So super helpful.

Marisha: And then was there anything else that you wanted to share in terms of identifying the core deficit before we talk about our roles based on the different deficits? Or are we good to dive into that?

Corey: No. I think the only other thing that I would add, like you just said, is that oftentimes especially if you have a student on an IEP and so, if you're in the schools and you're servicing these kiddos, most of them are probably on IEPs. And so really it is just taking the data that you already have available to you as part of even that eligibility assessment or that triannual assessment. So if you've got some of those measures, you can take a look back because a lot of these things are relatively stable without intensive intervention as well. So even if the testing's not super recent, which is ideal to have super recent testing. But even if you have to go back and look at historical data you can take a look at those assessment periods and see, Okay, what data do we have.

Corey: And in a best case scenario you have data around language. You have data around academic performance, specifically that literacy performance. And best, best case scenario, you also have some phonological awareness testing. That one I see a little bit less. In looking at IEPs we don't get that quite as often, but that's another critical, critical piece that we want to have included in those IEPs. So if you are part of that assessment team and have any pull or say, potentially just saying, Hey, it looks like we don't have a phonological awareness measure. Is that a way that we could add that in? So that you have that data moving forward.

Marisha: Yes. So helpful. Thank you for breaking that down a little bit more for us. Such good information.

Marisha: So now let's talk about our role. I know that school based SLPs especially, we are spread pretty thin. So what have you seen from your consulting and working with other SLPs, can you tell us a little bit about what you see them doing in terms of the three components of the triangle? And just giving a really quick overview of just those three core components.

Corey: Yeah. I'll let Mikayla take this one away.

Mikayla: Yeah. So like I said before, when we figure out what a student's core deficit is we're typically finding that there is some kind of gap or some sort of deficit in one of those three points in the triangle. If we are finding that it's an orthographically based deficit, the students are struggling in that orthography corner of the triangle, this is typically where we'll see them best supported by a special educator or in a general education classroom, depending on the severity of that deficit.

Mikayla: If it's a phonological deficit, and they are struggling in the phonology area, this is something where we really recommend that an SLP come in and be involved as with semantics because of the unique training and the unique background SLPs have in those two areas. So whether that's the student coming in working with the SLP or the SLP providing that professional development and that training to the special education team, we definitely want them involved in that phonology area.

Mikayla: I won't dive too deep into the role changing in that area yet because I know in the next episode we're going to dive specifically into phonological awareness and what that will look like. But that's where we're going to want to see an SLP come in as well as semantics, which I'll let Corey talk about a little bit.

Corey: Yeah. So in terms of what the role is going to look like for a student who a semantics deficit, this is where it's really critical where we have that assessment in both oral language and reading comprehension. Because in terms of the literacy processing triangle and that top piece, that semantics piece that we're thinking about, we could have a semantics breakdown for one of two reasons.

Corey: So one could be that we have an oral language issue and that students just aren't comprehending even if the information is provided orally to them. So what the role is going to look like for a speech language pathologist is addressing that is going to be exactly what you've always been doing. You don't need to change anything. You don't need to do anything different. You just need to recognize this is what's going to support the reading comprehension. So the reading comprehension gap, it's not just about teaching reading comprehension strategies. If they don't have the oral language, they're not going to be able to do it in print.

Corey: The bottom line is that we have this hierarchy of skills and oral language skills have to be developed before we can start looking at being able to do those same skills in reading. Or at the even highest level, being able to produce written content. We can't expect a student to be able to produce an essay or to be able to produce something like that if they can't comprehend language at this more basic level.

Corey: So in terms of what that looks like in an oral language, just do what you do. That's perfect. And recognize and be able to tell your team, Hey, we don't have the reading comprehension because we don't have the oral language comprehension. So that's what we're working on in our speech language therapy.

Corey: If we recognize, Hey, yes, we have a semantics deficit, but it's more specifically a reading comprehension deficit, and it's not necessarily an oral language deficit. Then what that role can look more like is, it can look more like supporting your special education team and helping them understand, Hey, here are the reading comprehension strategies that we need to use based on what we already know about how oral language develops. And keeping in mind that depending on your team, we just didn't receive background or training or anything on how to develop these skills. So oftentimes all we're really given is a bunch of worksheets and we're not quite sure what's the hierarchy in which we should be teaching reading comprehension skills and things like that.

Corey: So in terms of, depending on the core deficit, and depending on what that looks like, we need to recognize that that may impact how much your role is directly facing a student, versus how much of that is supporting your team.

Marisha: That's so helpful. And I love that you're building that decision tree for us. It's like we're doing that assessment, looking at the results, figuring out which point of the triangle is the biggest down, and then we get to decide. Like if it's orthography, that's something that we can leave to the special education teacher. We don't have to get a ton of training or anything to be able to support that. But there are SLPs who do focus on that when it comes to specializing in private practice. Maybe we can talk about that in just a second.

Marisha: But then so there's that decision tree. We've got the orthography happening. Then if it's phonology, we can do what we typically do. And if you have any questions about that, we'll deficit tie into that next time. And then with the semantics, a lot of it we get to continue doing whatever we have been doing. But I love the point of looking at oral language versus reading comprehension, and then potentially supporting the special education teacher in that way.

Marisha: So I just feel like that little tree helps break it down and make it so much less overwhelming. So thank you for that.

Marisha: And then, I'm curious too. Can you give some examples of maybe what you would recommend to a special education teacher? Just giving a couple of tactical examples of what that would look like in terms of how the SLP could support the special education teacher. What are some examples that you think that could help?

Corey: Absolutely. Yeah. It's a great question. So what I would say is that some of the best training and resources that I have seen in the area of reading comprehension specifically ... So thinking about that piece first, or that semantics piece first ... they're coming from speech language pathologists. And the reason that the best reading comprehension strategies and techniques that we're getting are coming from speech language pathologists is because of the understanding of, again, how oral language develops.

Corey: So oftentimes what we see happening in the special education world, and again I have a background with special education myself, it's because we just didn't get this training. But what happens is we're really looking at just worksheets. So when we're teaching reading comprehension we're giving students a passage to read through, and then we're just randomly asking them questions about it. Or we have different resources that we've got that just have random reading comprehension question. And what happens is we're just giving those over and over and over again hoping, praying, that with enough exposure that students are going to get it.

Corey: But what we know is that our struggling students don't get these skills by just repeated exposure, exposure, exposure. They need explicit instruction. So one of the things that I've seen coming out really well, or a good suggestion, that you as a speech language pathologist could make to your special education team would be, Hey, we actually need to explicit voice down how to start to recognize a main idea and key detail. So for example, one of the first things that you guys do as speech language pathologists, is you work on categorizing, right? You work on categorizing different concepts and different topics into little categorization maps. And essentially that's going to be the foundation of building our main idea and key details.

Corey: So really what it is in terms of giving them some suggestions is helping them understand, Hey, in order to be able to do main idea and key details, we need to understand how to categorize. Here are some different activities that you can use as a special educator to start to work on categorization. So just some of those types of things are really helpful.

Corey: I think one of the other things that can be helpful is helping them recognize that reading comprehension is not just like one big block of themes. But really it's an umbrella. And that we actually need to start breaking that down to main idea and key detail. Making inferences. Understanding vocabulary. Each of those individual pieces are critically important. We have a resource that breaks this down a little, so again, we're happy to share with your listeners in what are those pieces that really come under that umbrella term of reading comprehension. And just starting to say, Hey, here are the things that we do. Here's some resources that specifically fall into helping them understand how to make inferences, or how to do some of these things. Because there's just been a gap in understanding how exactly that needs to look in terms of oral language straight onto reading comprehension.

Corey: So really go ahead and just use this umbrella map that we're going to give to you. You can start to use that to try and understand, Okay, does your special education team understand that reading comprehension is not just a big block but it's actually a number of discreet, individual tasks that need to come together to comprehend material.

Marisha: That is so incredibly helpful. And just that perspective. I feel like we would be a little too ... because unless we spend time in the special education teacher's classroom, we don't know how she's teaching those components. So what you mentioned about in general, and this is of course a generalization, but a lot of teachers don't have that training. So they are just using those general worksheets. If we just spent a couple of minutes in the classroom observing her teaching that, we would really quickly be able to see, like, Oh, wait, wait, wait. We can tell this student is struggling to make inferences. That's why they always get a 60% score on that. Whereas the teacher might not be able to identify that. And I'm sure that all of us, we have easy access to a visual or some kind of activity to help break down that really specific skill.

Marisha: So I love that as a way to bridge the gap. And it's just seeing what they're doing and seeing what we can add or do to support. I love that perspective. That's super helpful.

Marisha: Let's skip into some super specific examples. Actually before we do that, let's talk about the orthography. So there are SLPs who do focus on orthography, right?

Corey: Absolutely. Yep. For sure.

Marisha: So what does that look like? If there's an SLP who's interested in diving into that, what would you recommend?

Corey: Yes. If you have SLPs who, especially like you mentioned, there are a subset of SLPs who, one, either are primarily responsible for supporting all of the literacy needs in the school. Less so in public schools and more so potentially in private schools. But definitely that can happen, or those who are looking to bridge the gap in private practice. So I'll let Mikayla speak a little bit to you what that looks like in terms of the SLPs that we work with who are either using this because they're fully responsible for literacy in the classroom as far as the support, or are using this in private practice as well.

Mikayla: Yeah. Absolutely. So starting at the most basic level, of that sound level, when you are working with a student on their sounds, just showing them a card that has a letter on it so that they can tie a visual from the sound that they're trying to produce to the letter that makes that sound. So, for example, if you're working on the letter "f" when you're asking them to make that sound, having a letter card there with the letter f on it so that visually they can see what letter they're trying to produce the sound for.

Mikayla: Then moving up to the word level, it's going to be the same thing. If they're trying to say a word, showing them a word card so that they can make that connection on the literacy processing triangle from the sound that they're producing to the word. And then tying it back up that semantic piece as well. So like Corey said earlier with bat. If they're trying to say bat instead of pat or you're working on something with that word, inaudible to get them to produce it, showing them the word and asking them about the semantic piece will tie in that orthography.

Mikayla: We like to say if an SLP wants to pull orthography in it's definitely something that's doable. It does not have to be hard. It's just adding in that one extra step to what you're already doing so that students can get that full connection of the triangle there and see how it connects.

Corey: So in terms of just adding this in, and honestly you can do those pieces even if you have a special education team who's supporting. Because oftentimes what's happening is these kids are getting breakdowns, like they're getting all these skills is isolation and they don't see how it connects. So that's a great way to create that connection between what you're doing and what the special education team is doing too. So keep that in mind. You have to just do that if you're fully responsible for literacy. You can do that regardless of your role in the school.

Corey: In terms of if you are fully responsible for literacy, what we do want to make sure with orthography that is very important, especially if you have a student who's very much struggling in reading and spelling. You want to make sure that you're using a systematic approach. So we want to make sure that we're using a sequential order in which we're teaching these letter patterns. Too often what I see is that students who are struggling with literacy are struggling because they're just getting kind of a random phonics approach, or are getting this piece mealed approach, and they don't necessarily have anybody who's working them through a systematic instruction of like, first we're going to teach all of the consonants. And then we're going to teach diagraphs. And then we're going to teach blends. And we're going to move onto more complex sound patterns as we go.

Corey: What we need to make sure of is if you're are doing this is private practice, or if you are supporting literacy as the sole literacy provider, you to make sure if you're targeting orthography, you are using a scope and sequence of letter introduction. So that's when we start to look more at a structured literacy approach as a whole as opposed to supplementing what you're doing and just adding some literacy sprinkles in. Literacy sprinkles are great. I love literacy sprinkles. But if you're fully responsible for supporting a student's literacy development and they are struggling, we need to make sure that we are using a structured, systematic approach. It's often been known as Orton Gillingham, the field is sort of shifting away from that term to more of a structured literacy approach. But it's the same idea that we're making sure that we're doing that in a systematic way.

Corey: So I want to be clear. There is a difference in what it looks like when you're supporting literacy as a primary deficit, and when you are supporting literacy as a sprinkle onto your language based therapy.

Marisha: Yeah. Absolutely. That's super helpful. Because I'm sure if we Googled Orton Gilllingham we could find some different trainings that way. Do you have any other recommendations in terms of where to go if an SLP is looking for that?

Corey: Yeah. Well, we have a training that we absolutely love that we put together. The way that we put this together, we really put it together with the thought of giving people the least amount of overwhelm possible. So what is the least amount of information that you can take and consume and be able to implement right away. And so the great thing about Orton Gillingham is that has a fantastic background. The methodology there is amazing. We absolutely love it. The problem is when you go to Orton Gillingham training you're still responsible for developing a comprehensive curriculum using the methodology that they've just taught you.

Corey: So what we went ahead and did is we took all of the best parts of those trainings. We stuck them together and then built a curriculum around it so that you can jump right in. Because what we've learned, and I'll let Mikayla speak a little bit to this, but what we've learned is that action brings a lot of clarity. So as you start getting in there and working with students, you start to make these connections of, Oh, orthography, the semantics, the phonology. You start making that literacy processing triangle connection more. But you have to get in there, and you have to be working with students. What we learned is that you kind of need a backbone to that.

Corey: You need some type of curriculum or something that you can use to start getting into action. Because when you go to Orton Gillingham you have a lot of great thoughts and ideas, but nothing that's actionable. And so without that action you lack clarity. So I'll let Mikayla speak a little bit to that because she came from this perspective of, No idea what literacy ... like I don't know what structured literacy looks like. How does that pull together?

Mikayla: Yeah. So the reason I brought up in the beginning that my background didn't include a literacy training is because so often we work with SLPs or other professionals that come into our program, we hear, Oh, literacy isn't my space. Or I don't have a background in it. I can't do this. And I'm the first to say, I didn't have a background in this either, but with the proper tools you absolutely can do this.

Mikayla: And that's especially true for SLPs, knowing you already have so much training in phonology and semantics. So with that structured scope and sequence in curriculum that Corey mentioned, all we really had to do, or when I started all I had to do was follow that program that we'd built so that I can be hitting on the orthography, phonology, and semantics together in order to get students back to being on grade level and help with their literacy skills.

Mikayla: So it definitely helps to get in there with students and see how this works because there are so many terms floating around and there are so many different moving parts to it. There's those three points to the triangle, how they're connecting, executive functioning like we talked about in the very beginning is a huge part of how those three points are connecting. And it's not until you're really sitting there with a child seeing how it's all coming together for them as an individual that you really start to see, okay, if I'm working with a student and they're constantly doing this, that means I need to pull in more support for the phonology piece of the triangle. Or if they're doing this, I need to be pulling an inference worksheet for semantics instead of main idea. We can absolutely find all from assessments, but the action will absolutely bring clarity as you move through the therapy with a child to see what they need and what you need to be doing in order to get them back to where they want to be and closing the gap for them there.

Marisha: I love that. You guys have so many amazing actionable tips. It's the best. I especially loved how, Corey, you called these literacy sprinkles. And I loved Mikayla's example of just having sound cards. Like if we're working on sound in isolation with our articulation kiddos. And then as we move into the word level, including those words. I'm sure we could continue that throughout the entire level, and include that written input as much as possible. But I'm curious if you guys have any other magical literacy sprinkle examples you could share.

Corey: Oh, goodness. So many literacy sprinkles. We can definitely dive even deeper into this in the next episode, but there's a lot of things that you can be doing in terms of every single one of those pieces of the triangle and thinking about what that looks like. So, yeah, Mikayla offered such an amazing example of an orthography literacy sprinkle of we're targeting this concept. So because we're targeting this concept let's just pair it to print. Anytime that you're are targeting anything, if you can even just write it down if you have a whiteboard or something.

Corey: You don't have to have a ton of materials. I think that's one of the things that I always felt like. Like, oh, I can't get into that piece because I don't have all my beautiful printed organized materials around it, which I know Marisha, you're right there with us loving like the organized beautiful materials, which are amazing. But sometimes you're in a session and you're like, I honestly can't pull another thing. So when you're thinking about that orthography piece, you can just write it on the whiteboard. You don't have to have complicated materials to make this work. So keeping that in mind for the orthography piece, just pair print to whatever you're doing.

Corey: In terms of phonology, one of the things that you can be doing is, if for example, you're working on the "k" sound and you're providing the word cupcake and you're hoping that they're going to get cupcake for you. We could also break that down and say, great, how many syllables in cupcake? Great. How many sounds in cupcake? Can you show me what those letters look like? And of course, you don't have to get too much into that if you don't have time, but something as simple as, I just asked a question of you. I didn't have extra materials, I'm just asking you for that. Or I'm working on the "k" sound for you, so let's play a little game. I'm going to tell you a bunch of sounds and I want you to guess what word I'm thinking of. And you might get [inaudible 00:50:31]. What word am I thinking of? You can even have them produce those back to you, and all of a sudden you've added a phonology component there where you're asking them to blend sounds together. That's fantastic. That's what they're doing when they're reading. We need that to be a really fluent process.

Corey: And then in terms of semantics what you're doing with your literacy based therapy in pulling books in and things like that. That is the perfect way to be making sure that you're building and developing those oral language skills. And then you're immediately pulling that connection in with the printed text and being able to see how does this translate into what I'm reading.

Corey: Then for your older students you could even have a little written response that they provide you. And that's really closing that gap too, between oral language, reading, and writing. Those three pieces that we like to think about. So those would be the big things that I would definitely recommend. We can talk, again, more about phonology specifically because there's a lot that can be done there specifically to support these little literacy sprinkles inside of your session.

Marisha: Such good information. And I'm curious too. Do you have any tips in terms of the written responses. Because I know that our sessions are so short and we're trying to get so much done in that time. Sometimes if a student writes out a sentence for me a lot of times there's lots of different errors that we could be focusing on. Do you have any tips in terms what would be most ... How do we decide what to focus on there? Or how can we maximize the time that we spend on that writing?

Corey: Yes. That is such a great question because I've had a number of people ask me. Like, I don't have time to work on handwriting. And I don't have time to work on the spelling. And I completely understand that. So I think in terms of an SLP's role one of the best things that you can be doing for writing support is anytime that you are using any type of graphic organizer or visual that you're using to help instruct a certain concept. So for example, if you were looking at main idea and key details, if you had some type of graphic organizer that you were using for that, just showing them quickly how they could write even just a couple of words into that mind map of sorts. Because I think as an SLP, one of the best things that you can bring is an understanding of really the function of language and how that works as opposed to the actual, like the spelling and the capitalization and the handwriting and all of those.

Corey: I think those are tasks that you're going to leave to your special education team. Those are things that we can really pass off to them. One of the things as an SLP that you might want to look at is can they recognize errors. Like, Hey, we're going to send out the cops. That's one thing that we use a lot. Let's send out the cops real quick. I just want you to tell me, do you have capital? Do you believe that you have good sentence structure or good organization? Do you have a punctuation? Do you have spelling? One of the things that you can look at, not that you have to fix all of those things, but just do you even recognize it? Do they even have any of that executive functioning or metacognitive skills to recognize that their sentence wasn't good? Sometimes they know. Sometimes they'll say, I don't think this sentence is structured appropriately. And sometimes they don't.

Corey: And I think really the key role of an SLP is to be able to articulate where those errors are for the special education team. So, hey, we did a sentence and there was a lot of errors that I could correct. What I noticed was I noticed we struggled with mechanics, the capitals and the punctuation. Or we struggled with sentence structure. Or we struggled with the spelling piece. And really just identifying that to hand it off. Because I think as an SLP you have too much other pieces of the puzzle on your plate to be able to get into anything more in depth than that.

Corey: So, again, I would focus primarily for writing, if you're doing anything oral language, if you're doing anything reading comprehension wise with graphic organizers, have them just produce something quick, short, just tangible. It can be a couple of words in each of those so that they can start their thinking and organize their language around what they want to write. But in terms of sentences and thing like that, I think it's really going to be more about collecting data and providing that data to your special education team.

Mikayla: Okay. And on that same note, one of the activities that I'll do with my students, I try to overlap as much of this as I can, is if we are working on the "k" sound, like Corey mentioned earlier and the student was tasked with figuring out the word milk after having the different sounds, I'll then have them use that in their sentences. So I'll say, Okay, you need to use the word when you're writing a sentence. You need a who or a what, your subject, did what, predicate, and then adding the adverbial, why, when, where, or how. And we have that nice record organizer for them so that we're hitting on all of the same skills, overlapping to save that time. A lot of it can be saved for that special education team and that teacher, but if you have the extra minute, definitely having them break down the syntax of that sentence. And breaking it down there, making sure they can use the words appropriately in that vocabulary piece is always great data to take. I always find it super interesting with my students when I have them do that.

Marisha: I love that example, and that's especially helpful when we're working with mixed groups too. Because we might have a student working on saying that final k sound and then maybe someone else is working on irregular past tense verbs, and someone else is working on pronouns. All sorts of goals together. And so that example is such a great way to put all of those skills together. We often have visual and graphic organizers to support that, like Mikayla said, and so it's just a way to put those skills together, and then to anchor it with that written response. Maybe even the kids can work together on that. I love that. Such a good example.

Corey: Yeah. And we have a great visual for that too. So we will share that. I have a little packet that you guys can just download, but that shows exactly what looks like in terms of us. Like here's the word that we're targeting, or the sound pattern that we're targeting, and then here's your little graphic organizer in terms of the who or what, did what, why, when, how. I do, I love that Mikayla, because I think that's such a great language construct that we can start to take a look at and that a lot of our students are really, really struggling with.

Marisha: Love it. And then I had just one random question related to the written responses. Do you know of any research or anything that shows whether there's a benefit to ... If I was modeling the graphic organizer on the board and each of the students had their own, if there a benefit for them to be copying what I write? Or it is better for them to generate on their own? Do you have any feedback or input there?

Corey: Yeah. So in terms of teaching those graphic organization strategies, usually there's going to be a hierarchy. So in the beginning when you first introduce a new organization, or graphic organization strategy, you would model that for them. So you would go through the passage, or go through your book, or whatever you're using to target that concept and then you would show them, Here's what I'm thinking. Like let's do this graphic organizer together. I'm going to walk you through my process. So let's go ahead and you copy mine as a model, and then you use that as your model moving forward.

Corey: But then you want them to graduate to that next level of them being able to take that and do it on their own. And so it's a great opportunity too, if you're using those graphic organizers, once you've explicitly taught it, you've modeled it, they have a model to follow. They're going to do their own. If you've got a mixed groups, too, or even just a group of any students, it doesn't matter how well aligned they are in their topics, but it's a great opportunity for conversation. Because what you're going to get, is you're going to get students going off the graphic organizer a little bit differently. So you can talk about, Oh, how interesting that so and so put this, and so and so put that. And all of a sudden you have a perspective taking activity. All of a sudden you've got a lot of gems of information coming out just from that conversation of them filling that out independently.

Corey: So there's a lot of great research around the benefit and the use of graphic organization strategies as a primary tool for teaching reading comprehension. Yeah. It's really good to graduate them away from the modeling onto independent work with it.

Marisha: And does that also apply is they're doing writing? Let's say last session I had them write a sentence and there were just way to many issues with it. Would it still benefit the student if I wrote down a sentence or a word and have them copy it onto their organizer or whatever? Does that same kind of model apply when it comes to written language?

Corey: Yeah. For sure. Absolutely. And that's why we really like the idea, too, of really modeling the sentence frames that Mikayla brought up. So the who or the what, did what, why, when, how. Because a lot of times there are a lot of errors in that written structure. So what we do, I can let Mikayla speak a little bit to this, but in our earlier curriculum what that look like in terms building that skill by providing some of that to them. So I'll let you talk a little bit about that, Mikayla, our little sentence building.

Mikayla: Yeah. So in the beginning I will definitely model for the students. But I'll typically ask them then to create a sentence, maybe using that same key word, but choosing their own answer. So if I gave them, okay, the who is Jenny. Drank her milk. At the table. Okay, now you need to pick a new who and the adverbial. So maybe they'll say, Oh, Rogan spilled the milk this morning. And try to get them to model those different pieces so that they can see how mind came together, but then they need to come up with their own pieces so that they're applying and generalizing what I gave them. But it's easier said than done, so often I'll ask my students and they will try to give me the same who for five sentences in a row. And the same did what for five sentences in a row. So I need to give them that extra task of saying, Okay, you're going to write five sentences. Maybe they all have that "k" sound in the key word, but you can't use the same person twice. Or you can't use the same action twice.

Mikayla: So it's definitely working on so many skills all together, including some of those higher level thought processes. And just that creative writing piece, trying to come up with who am I going write about and how do I make them different. But modeling is going to be super, super important for them as they go. Sometimes I'll have students try to break up their sentences with a who did what, and then the why, when, how. And they are breaking it down incorrectly. I had one the other day come in and they put the action in the why box because they tried to break it up word for word instead of the different pieces of the sentence. So it's definitely going to be child dependent how they're performing and what errors they make in all these different pieces.

Mikayla: But we are big on modeling here, and scaffolding. So sometimes my students will ask, "Well, can't you give me an example first?" And I'll try to graduate them through and say, "Oh, I gave you an example last time, and you did really well. I want to see if you can do this on your own today." And then we'll work together to figure out how we can make it better or if it's correct. And definitely trying to scaffold it for them throughout the process.

Corey: I think a key piece to keep in mind here, is if you have students who can't do that at all, the way that you scaffold that down even further is that we have a number of times where we will offer the who or what. So we'll give them three choices of a who or what. And then we'll give them three choices of a did what. And we'll give them three choices of a why, when, how. So like at our more basic level we actually have word cards that we will provide for each of those. And then basically it's like a choose your own adventure with your three choices. So we call them silly sentences, and you can just pick.

Corey: So the great thing about that is then it is sort of copying. So then underneath of that we'll have them write the sentence. Then what we're looking for is, Okay, did you add a capital? Did you add a punctuation? You had the words in front of you, essentially to copy, but the great thing is, is what we do, we align that to whatever concept we're targeting. So if we're targeting the "k" sound, we're going to have a bunch of just different who's that have a "k", a bunch of different did what's that have a "k", and a bunch of different why, when, or how's that have a "k", to try and get them practicing. So, again, you're really pulling in multiple of those skills at the same time so that they can see how is the work that I'm doing with my articulation group, how does that also then correlate into what I'm reading and what I'm writing. Reading and writing are reciprocal processes. So we always keep that in mind too.

Mikayla: Absolutely. And you can also work on, once they've got those skills down and being able to identify or produce the three different pieces and put together a correctly formed sentence, seeing if they can reorder it to work on some of those pieces as well. So instead of having, I went to the park on Saturday, reordering it and saying, On Saturday I went to the park. And seeing if they can manipulate those sentences in that way for a higher level skill as well.

Marisha: So good. So many amazing tips. Thank you, Corey and Mikayla. I can't wait to dive into phonological awareness in the next episode. It's going to be amazing, just like this one was.

Marisha: For those of you listening, if you want to access any of the resources that we mentioned, including their freebies and links to what Corey and Mikayla are up to, if you want to learn more about them, you can head to slpnow.com/27. And then we'll all get together again next week to talk all about phonological awareness.

Corey: Thank you so much.

Mikayla: Thank ...