00:00
Hello there, and welcome to the SLP now podcast, where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode. This week we are diving into another month long therapy unit. We are doing a series of six episodes where we break down month long units for your entire school age caseload from preschool through 12th grade. And this week we are diving into a fiction article. This unit is ideal for older students who still benefit from narrative support, and there is tons of research supporting targeting narratives even through high school. There's been some really cool studies, and I will share a couple of resources in the show notes so you can learn a little bit more.


00:58
And then if you're not quite sure which unit type is ideal for your caseload as you're listening to these episodes, check out the show notes and those [email protected] 185 again slpnow.com 185 and you will find a link to a two minute quiz that once you take that we will send you a recommended list of units for your specific caseload. And like I said, there will be resources about targeting narratives and tons of other resources as I mentioned them throughout this episode. So hopefully that is super helpful. And now we get to dive into the actual unit. We are going to be reading Miss Johnson's plant experiment. It is a fiction article that is available for free on read works and I will share the link to that resource in the show notes as well.


01:58
And again, they [email protected] 185 and it is an article about some students who conduct a plant experiment. And we'll walk through the five steps of the literacy based therapy framework. Doctor Ukraine it's framework and I will share different activity ideas for each of the five steps. And the cool thing about this framework is that you can target any goal, literally any goal, using this text. And the cool thing about this is that it's very contextualized practice and it's very meaningful for students and that can really facilitate generalization and all the things I could talk about literacy based therapy for hours and hours. So in the show notes, I'll just share some quick resources that will be helpful. Anyway, let's dive into step one, which is pre story knowledge activation.


02:59
There are four things that I like to do, like a menu of options that I generally choose from. And this list is not comprehensive, but they're just some of my favorites. So the first step is to do an article walk where we'll pull up the article. They typically have a little photo at the top and then the title, and then we might skim a couple of the paragraphs. And then I will just ask the students what they know about the topic and kind of ask a couple questions and see how much background knowledge they have. If they really struggle with the article walk, then I will take a step back. And I really like to use a KWL chart.


03:43
So this is where you split a piece of paper into like, you draw three columns on a piece of paper, and the k stands for what they know, w stands for what they want to learn, and l stands for what they learned. So as we're going through, we can kind of fill in the k column about what they already know. So what do they know about plants? What do they know about plant experiments? What do they want to know about plants and plant experiments? And then as we go through the next steps, we can fill in the l column about what they learned. And this is a great way to build that background knowledge, which will be critical as we dive into the different language skills as we go through.


04:29
It'll help with their grammar, it'll help with being able to make inferences, all of that good stuff. So that's what we've got for the KWL chart. So one thing that we might do to help fill in that chart is to do a virtual field trip. I will include an example of a virtual field trip that you might use for this unit in the show notes. But I like to pick out a virtual field trip based on my students needs and just to take a quick step back. A virtual field trip is typically just a YouTube video. There are some other resources that you can use for those quote unquote virtual field trips, but it's just a video that gives students a little bit more background knowledge.


05:15
You could also pull like research articles or not research articles, but you could pull non fiction picture books. Or you can do a Google search and find some educational resources there as well. But I really like the YouTube video because it helps they get to experience it a little bit more than they might just by looking at some pictures. So I really enjoy those. And then the last activity that I like to do is to have students pre fill story grammar organizer. So after doing those different activities, I will have them guess what is going to happen in the article. So they'll fill in like who the characters are, what the setting is, what they think the problem will be, and it's really an inferencing activity.


06:01
But after doing that article walk using the KWL chart, filling them with a virtual field trip, they'll have some really good context to help them with that activity. And I like this because it gives them increased exposure to the story grammar elements and it helps give them a little bit of a framework before we dive in. And especially with older students, we'll keep this first story grammar organizer and compare it to the actual story grammar organizer for the actual story, like what actually happens. And there's some really nice compare and contrast. This is great for some different syntax activities. Oh my goodness, so many good things. That is step one. So just to recap, we do an article walk, a KWL chart, the virtual field trip, and then we pre fill the story grammar organizer and use your clinical judgment.


06:52
You don't have to do all these activities. And you may need to do multiple virtual field trips depending on the student's needs. And remember, all of these activities are language rich, so we can target any goal throughout all of these activities. And sometimes that might just look like modeling and recasting the grammar and vocabulary targets, but other times they're responding to questions, they're using vocabulary words. There's so many opportunities to embed practice for those skills. So that is step one. And if you're curious about kind of more of the nitty gritty details of how each session is structured and how do you know which tips like, especially if you have a mixed group with a bunch of students and a bunch of goals, how do you know what to target?


07:44
I will share some resources in the show notes as well on how I structure a session and how I decide what to focus on and kind of how I organize that. Like if you have a group of three students and they all have four different goals, how in the world would you target those twelve goals in the context? I get that would be overwhelming. So check out the show notes for the link to some session structure resources to help you with that. And now we get to dive into step two, which is reading. That's the easiest step in the whole framework. You would just pull up the article and then read through it. And at this level, students may be able to read these independently.


08:28
Maybe you want to do popcorn reading where each student reads a paragraph, or maybe it just makes sense for you to read the whole paragraph or the whole article. You can decide what makes the most sense and what is most engaging for your group. And in this step, you just read through the article. This is by far the shortest step in the whole unit. It will likely take you about five minutes. You don't want to add a bunch of extra stuff here. Just focus on reading the article and just making sure that students are engaged during the reading, but you don't need to add anything else. So then that brings us to step three, which is post story comprehension. And there are three main areas that I will focus on for step three. The first one is literal questions.


09:19
And again, I'm going to emphasize this again, every activity that I list is language rich and you can use it to target any goal. So yes, we may have students in our group who have a goal to work on answering WH questions about a story, but we may not. But this is still a helpful activity because we can use it to when they're responding to these questions, we are able to target those grammar, vocabulary, articulation, any of those types of goals we can still use. So literal questions are just basic questions about the story. Then we can also ask inferential questions. I really like this activity for this age group too, because we did do that prior knowledge and so that'll give them, they're able to reference the text and use the prior knowledge that they've built to successfully answer these types of questions.


10:16
So I love this combination in the structure of the unit. I think it works out really well. Another idea for a comprehension activity is story grammar. So you can pull out that story grammar organizer and just run through the elements and ask wh questions. Who was the story about? When did the story happen? Where did it happen? What was the problem? Run through those questions and I often revisit the story grammar story retell in step four and step five of the unit. So this is a great kind of bridge activity to lead them to that. And again, we can target all of our students goals throughout this activity as well. Then that brings us to step four, which is the structured skill practice. And there are an unlimited number of activities that we could use in this step.


11:11
We can spend several sessions diving into all of the student skills. So I am just going to share a couple ideas. And then one cool thing about the SLP now membership is that we have a bunch of activities linked. We have a page for every therapy plan. We have over 400 therapy plans. We've been working really hard. And then we have a unit plan page that lists activities. So it will list all of the different things you could do for step one, step two, step three, step four. And then we also have activities linked. And there's a mix of just click and go like Google Slides types of materials, some of them are PDF's, some of them are interactive materials. There are lots and lots of options for you to have easy access to those activities.


12:05
But for the skill section, we've analyzed all of the books and identified all of the targets. So like all the articulation words, all of the prefixes, suffixes, all the grammar structures, all the syntax stuff. And we're constantly building this out and adding more resources to save you tons of time, because implementing literacy based therapy really isn't very difficult. But it can make a world of a difference to have easy access to all of the activities to target your student specific goals. It just makes it so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time, and it cuts down your planning time significantly. So you can absolutely implement this on your own.


12:50
But if you are looking for a little bit of support, head to slpnow.com unit and you can sign up for a totally free trial, no credit card required, and you can go to therapy plans tab. Type in Miss Johnson's plan experiment, and then you will have access to the unit plan, all the targets, all of the materials, and you'll have everything that you need to implement this right away without any prep. So like I said, we'll dive into a couple activity ideas, but know that there are way more ideas and resources waiting for you. Some ideas are working on cause and effect questions, so this can a lot of our students might have goals around this, and so there are some pre written cause and effect questions. I'm sure you could generate your own cause and effect questions.


13:43
We also have some compare and contrast activities, so we in terms of vocabulary. So we've selected some vocabulary from the article and created some compare and contrast activities. And then you can also compare and contrast your story grammar organizers from step one and step three. So that's a great activity. We've also identified some fact and opinion statements from the article, and that can be a really fun activity for students working on those types of goals. But again, it's also a very language rich activity, so you can still pull this activity and target your students other goals as well. We've identified tier two vocabulary words and have multiple meaning word activities and evidence backed vocabulary activities to help you work through those. We've identified the prefixes and suffixes and have really cool activities to help you target those.


14:39
We're working on adding syntax activities for all of them. So if you need support with embedded clauses and all of that good stuff, you'll have some ready to go resources for that as well. And then I don't always love when I have to target articulation in a mixed group. I really prefer to target articulation separately, using like, a speedy speech model or something like that. But we know that's not always possible. And so we have articulation activities, like little articulation bundles that are specific for every article and book. And so you can, if you go to Miss Johnson's plant experiment, you can find the articulation bundle there, and it has article specific targets.


15:28
And again, you can use these articulation targets for your students working on those articulation goals, but you can also use them for grammar and vocabulary targets or whatever other goals you're working on. And then that brings us to step five, which is creating a parallel story. So throughout the unit, we've been revisiting the story grammar organizer, and in step three, we kind of started filling it out. And then in step four is when we would have continued to practice that. And then in step five, we would revisit the story grammar organizer for the article, and then we would work as a group to create our own story. So the first thing I would do is have them fill in the graphic organizer for their new story, and they get to choose what the story is about.


16:19
If throughout the unit, a lot of stuff will come up. And so maybe they did a plant experiment in their class, or maybe they want to do a plant experiment, and they can make up a story about what that would be like. So there's lots of options there. And then once we fill in the organizer with their version of the story, then everyone in the group will practice retelling the story, even if they don't have a narrative goal. This is a really great opportunity to embed all of their vocabulary and just all of the goals that we've been working on throughout the entire unit. Everyone works on retelling the story until they hit mastery, and then we publish it. And publishing the story can include acting it out and maybe recording a little video.


17:09
And then students can take turns narrating that final story, or we can grab a stack of paper and kind of bind it and have them illustrate it, or we can do a digital version using like, Google Slides or anything like that. I did a whole podcast episode just on parallel stories, so I will share that in the show notes as well. So that wraps up the ideas for our fiction article again. Head to SLP now.com 185 to check out all of the resources that I mentioned, and we'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to the SLP now podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your SLP friends. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast to get the latest episodes sent directly to you. See you next time.

00:00
Hello there, and welcome to the SLP now podcast, where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode. I am recording a series of episodes where I share month long therapy units for your entire school age caseload from preschool through high school. And last week we talked about the early language unit, which is perfect for those preschool kindergarten students. And this week we're diving into a picture book unit, which is great for that k through two range. And I'm really excited to dive in. And if you're listening to these episodes and you're wondering which units are ideal for your caseload, we have the perfect resource for you.

00:59
We have a two minute quiz that once you take that, we will send you a list of recommended units for your caseload so you don't have to keep wondering. And it'll be a nice little email with all of the resources all bundled together. And you can find the link to that quiz in the show [email protected]. And the show notes will also include any other links that I share during this episode today. So again, you can find [email protected] 184 now, throughout this unit, we are going touch on a handful of goals. So we'll talk about articulation, basic concepts, grammar, syntax, vocabulary, phonological awareness, comprehension. So we'll focus primarily on those goals. But you can use this unit to target any goal, literally any goal that you are working on with your students.

01:59
All of the activities in this unit are language rich and they are the perfect context for therapy. So now let's dive into the actual unit. So we are going to be reading the book. Spring is here. It's a super cute story about a mole and a bear. The mole wakes up because he's done hibernating and spring is here, but the bear is still asleep and the mole really wants his friend to wake up and he does a bunch of problem solving to get the bear to wake up. So that's the story. Now let's dive into the steps of the unit. So step one, and just to take a step back first, I like to structure my units using Doctor Ukraine, it's literacy based therapy framework.

02:47
If you're not familiar with that or you need a refresher, head to the show notes and I'll link some resources there to get you up to speed. But I will do my best to explain all of the steps as we go through. So hopefully you can still follow. There will be additional [email protected] 184 okay, so that brings us to step one. Prestory knowledge activation. There are four different things that I like to do in this step of the unit, and I always get questions about the timing of all of, like, how long does this unit actually take? How much time do you spend in each step? And the answer is, it really depends on the group.

03:30
But I find that with a school age caseload where I'm working with groups, I tend to spend about a month on a unit, and this tends to match up. So if I see students once a week for 30 minutes, it ends up taking about a month. If I see students a couple times a week for those 30 minutes sessions or whatever the length is, it also ends up taking about a month, because with how I do my scheduling, the students who are being seen more frequently have more needs. And so we just need more time to get through the unit. So that's how long the entire unit ends up taking. And then we'll talk about how much time we would spend on each of the steps as we go through them.

04:13
But for step one, this really depends on the student's level of background knowledge walking into the unit. So sometimes it might just take a session or a little bit less than a session, but other times we might have to spend a couple sessions filling in that background knowledge. So there we go. In terms of what we would actually do, the first thing that I like to do is a book walk. So if I have the actual book, I'll show them a cover, maybe look at a couple pages and just kind of observe what they're able to tell me about what they see.


04:49
And if they are able to put together beautiful sentences and describe all the things, and they demonstrate a lot of knowledge about hibernation and spring and all the season changes, then I might skip some of the activities that I'm going to tell you about. But if they struggle with this activity, which more often than not is what happens, then I will use a KWL chart to help kind of take an inventory of what we actually do know and what we want to learn about the topic. So a KWL chart is just basically a piece of paper split into three segments. And then the first column, we write what we know about the topic. In the second column, we write what we want to know, and then in the third column, we write what we learned.


05:40
And so I usually try to match that up with what we want to learn. But again, this is a language rich activity, so it's not just a fluff activity. It is the perfect context for working on our students goals. Whether they are working on vocabulary or answering questions or using grammatical structures, as we're discussing and writing questions, answering questions, we're able to target all of those goals in a really beautiful and meaningful way. And then another activity that we can use is a virtual field trip. So we're able to fill in a lot of the KWL chart as we're doing the virtual field trip. So for spring is here, and I would choose a virtual field trip based on the needs of my group. But one field trip that I came across that I really liked was about it kind of explains the seasons.


06:33
And that time concept is a little bit tricky for some kiddos. So I think that's a really great activity to embed here. But then the video continues to dive into spring, what we see in spring. It talks a little bit about hibernation, and so it helps illustrate some of those vocabulary concepts, and it also helps us understand, okay, like why is the bear sleeping? And why do things look the way that they do? It's just, I really like that video to target a lot of the common concepts that my students struggle with when we're reading this book. Then the fourth activity that I like to do, I will almost always do a book walk, and I will almost always pre fill the graphic organizer.


07:17
And then the KWL chart and the virtual field trip are maybe kind of dependent on the needs of the group. So the fourth thing that I like to do, again, is that graphic organizer. So I will print off or I will pull up a digital version of my story grammar organizer. And based on what we discussed, I will have students infer the characters in the story, the problem in the story, and all of those story grammar elements. This is a really great activity for a number of reasons, because, one, it gives them exposure to the story grammar elements. It is a great way to tie in all of the pre story knowledge learning that we did across the three previous activities. And it's just, again, a great language activity. We are creating sentences, we're embedding vocabulary concepts, all of that good stuff.


08:11
So that is step one. And the four activities that I like to use here are book walk, KJBL chart, virtual field trip, and then pre fill that story grammar organizer. And then that brings us to step two, which is to read the book. And the book can be read in just a few minutes. Like, I found a YouTube video, and the video is three minutes long. And that is a tip. If you are not able to purchase the actual book or your library doesn't have it in stock or whatever the case might be, you can access the book on YouTube. I do have a little trick to access YouTube without ads, so I will add that to the show notes as well. So that brings us to step three, post story comprehension.


08:57
So after we finish reading the book, whether or not the students have specific goals for literal and or inferential questions, for the literal questions, I have little question cards that have questions and then visual answer choices. And so I may or may not use the answer choices if it's not necessary for the students. But I find that's a really nice way to scaffold this. So we'll run through the questions, and again, it's a language rich activity. It is not just a comprehension activity because I ask the questions and then the students respond. So we can use this to target vocabulary, grammar, all of the things. And then the second thing that I like to do, well, I guess literal questions is one, inferential questions is another.


09:46
The units in SLP now include lists of inferential questions, but where slps, we can come up with list of questions too. Then the third thing is story grammar. So I've created story grammar organizers that include pre little icons for spring is here, and for every book that we have in our library, it has a little icon for the characters and the setting and all of that. And then that can be a way to scaffold this activity. And it's a great comprehension activity because who was in the story? That's a question. When did it happen? Where did it happen? What was the problem? Those are all wh questions, and it's just a really nice, meaningful activity to work on comprehension.


10:33
And then we can shape that into if the students are working on narratives, then we can continue to target that in step four, which is focus skill activities or skill practice. So in the last video, I spent a lot of time talking about activities for step four, and I feel like there are even more skills and activity ideas for spring is here because the early language book was a lot more play based, but here we go. I'm going to try and keep this as succinct as possible while still giving you really nice, concrete examples. And I keep mentioning SLP now, and you can absolutely implement this on your own if you go to the show notes. I have linked a bunch of the resources that I've mentioned throughout this episode, and I really hope that you have what you need to implement.


11:28
And if you want a little bit more support inside SLP now, we have the unit plan that lists all of these activities with related resources. And for step four, we also have a tab under, like, there's a page for the unit that lists all of the targets. And for each target, we have linked activities to help you teach those skills and do some really structured practice with them. And then you have access to all of the different materials in one spot without having to do any prep. So I think that is a huge time saver. I needed this when I was managing my caseload in the triple digits. And if you are wanting some support and you're like, okay, I don't want to put this together myself, just give me the resources. You can try it completely free, like no credit card required.


12:20
And we have this unit plus 400 more. So if you had to slp now.com unit, you can find information about the free trial and sign up. Go to therapy plans tab. Type in spring is here. And then you'll have access to all of the activities. But I'll walk you through some now, and I'll just pick a handful of them. Okay, so one of the goals that I mentioned was articulation. So I prefer to target articulation separately, but sometimes we just have those mixed groups. And it is what it is. We have gone through all of the books and identified the highest frequency words and articulation targets. And then we have made book specific articulation activities.


13:07
And so for each of our books, you can go through and you can find, like, for spring is here, we have an articulation activity pack, and it includes a bunch of different targets. This one had, like, a lot of s blends and vocalic r and sh. And so we have book specific lists and articulation cards. So it is a language retractivity still, even though it's articulation. And so we can use those cards for our articulation kiddos. But if someone else is working on describing, we can describe the pictures. If someone is working on syntax or grammar, we can work on creating sentences using those cards. These opportunities are endless. And then let's say we're working on some basic concepts. So we've identified the basic concepts in the book as well. And there, this is based on a research article.


14:00
Like, we structured these activities based on how the research told us to or what the research indicated. And we have some direct instruction activities, like, for example, open and close is one of the common concepts in the book. And then we have a slide deck that you can use to teach that basic concept in a very structured and evidence backed way. So that can be some of your very structured teaching, but you can still, again, you know what I'm going to say, it's a language rich activity, and as we're going through that, our students can work on, like creating sentences and describing the vocabulary and all of those things. So just because it says it's a basic concept activity doesn't mean we can't use it to target a number of goals.


14:47
We also have a printable sentence pack with icons, but we also have digital ones. If you don't have the time to prep and print. So you can, in the unit plan, you can literally just click to open up the sentence pack, and then you can use that. There's little icons that students can use to build sentences. This is really helpful if students are, because I like to model and recast the grammar targets and the vocabulary too. But if students aren't picking that up, I find that they really benefit from a visual activity to practice that skill. So, like with students who I've modeled and recasted irregular past tense verbs a million times, but they continue to produce errors with that, I find that having those icons makes a world of a difference. So that's an example of how you can do that.


15:41
And again, it's language rich. We can target a bunch of goals using that. Then we have describing activities which you can use for categories, object functions, synonyms, antonyms, as well as grammar, all of those things. We also have a smart deck which includes more drill based practice for describing categories, plural nouns, past tense verbs, and phonological awareness. If you're trying to sprinkle that into your sessions. So lots and lots of options there, and we can spend a huge chunk of the unit in step four. And then the last step five, is to create a parallel story. So I grab a fresh story grammar organizer, and I'll pull up our initial story grammar organizer. If the students are like, oh, like, I wish the story was more like the one that we made in step one versus the actual story, then we can do that.


16:38
But I grabbed the story grammar organizers that we made in the previous steps, and then we grab a fresh one. And then I ask the students, I explained that they get to make their own story, and we get to choose how we structure it, and we're just going to take this story as inspiration. So they then get to fill in the story grammar organizer with their own story. Maybe there was a time that they couldn't wake up, or maybe they have a favorite story from the springtime, or maybe they did something really fun at school that's related to the spring, or maybe they want to pick another hibernating animal.


17:12
Whatever they're interested in, they get to make the story and then just use the previous organizers as so the first thing they need to do is fill out that organizer and then we practice retelling the story so they can record themselves telling the story or we can act it out. And they eventually have to be able to act it out independently, without my help or without referencing the organizer. But it ends up being a really simple story. But we go through the steps of outlining it, practicing the retell, and once they get really good at that, then we publish it. And we can do this by just like grabbing a stack of paper and stapling it together and making a little book. We can make a digital book on using like PowerPoint or Google Slides, whatever makes the most sense.


18:05
Sometimes we will just record us acting out the story and the students will take turns narrating it, or each student will narrate their own story. You can decide what combination of these makes the most sense for your group, but yeah, that brings us to the end of the unit. So again, if you want to access any of the resources that I shared during this episode, head to slpnow.com 184 and I can't wait to see you next week where we'll dive into a fiction article. Thanks for listening to the SLP now podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your SLP friends. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast to get the latest episodes sent directly to you. See you next time.

00:00
Hello there, and welcome to the SLP Now podcast, where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode.

00:19
Hello there, and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. I'm really excited to dive into one of my very favorite topics, and that is how to use probe data. And so just a quick refresher and just the terminology, making sure we're on the same page. A probe is a quick assessment that you administer in a session. I personally do this at the beginning of the session, but it's without any support, and it's just seeing how the student is able to perform on any given skill. So, for example, at the beginning of a session, if a student is working on articulation goals and they're working on the k sound, I might administer a probe where I give the student five pictures with initial k words, and I ask them to produce those words, and I don't give any support.

01:20
I just jot down how the student performs, and that gives me some really helpful data to use within the session. So two of the factors here are that I don't give the student support. I just want to see how they do independently, and I also don't give any feedback. And that's why I like to keep the probes short and sweet, very quick and to the point. Just get a couple of quick data points, enough of a sample to help me make some decision making, but not too much where it takes up a huge chunk of the session. The student gets bored, frustrated, et cetera. So that's what that looks like. And we've talked about this a lot throughout the podcast, but today I wanted to just talk a little bit about how to use that data and how it can help you in your session and how it can help you better support your students. So, like I said, I like to administer that quick probe right at the beginning of the session, and it gives me information that I can use to set myself and the student up for success within the session. So if we go back to that initial k example, if the student really struggles, and you'll come up with your own kind of guidelines over time, and you'll use your clinical judgment, it might vary based on the student, based on the goal. There's all sorts of factors that you can use, but I'm just going to give you some rough examples. So for the purposes of this illustration, I split student performance kind of into three categories. So if the student misses, like, if we're doing five questions.

03:06
If the student misses four or five of these questions, or maybe between zero to 20 or zero to 30% accuracy, if you have more stimulus items, then I know that I need to take a step back and teach the skill because the student is not producing k independently, and maybe the one that they produce was just by luck and not a true representation of actual mastery, and maybe they're beginning to master the skill and that happened to be a facilitative context, and we can use that information as well. So if the student scores that low, like if they aren't able to produce any initial k, or if they produce one initial K, I know that I need to take a major step back and we're going to do some shaping and teaching.

03:58
And if instead of articulation, I was looking at naming items in categories or producing regular plural nouns, the same applies regardless of the skill. I'm just going to take a step back and make sure that I do some teaching and do some really structured practice in just meeting the student where they're at. And we have lots of previous episodes about specific supports that you can use for different types of goals. So I would reference those when it comes to figuring out how to teach those skills and break things down. Then if the student demonstrates some mastery of the skill, so maybe if they're able to produce two or three initial k words, or if they score 40 to 60 or 30% to 70% accuracy. Again, these are very rough numbers, and it kind of depends on how many items you give the student.

04:54
But that's telling me that the student is starting to master the skill, but they need a little bit of support. They're not quite at mastery, and we need to continue, maybe review the skill.

05:09
And back up a little bit, but.

05:13
We don't need to spend the whole session teaching. They're already demonstrating some of that mastery. So it's reasonable to assume that with a little bit of quick review, they'll be ready to practice this in context. And then the third kind of subgroup is if the student is able to produce four out of five or all five initial k words, then they're starting to demonstrate mastery of that skill. And I want to give the student as many opportunities as possible to practice that skill independently. If I spend a ton of time teaching and trying to break things down, the student already has demonstrated mastery of it, then they'll be really bored. And we're also not in that zone of proximal development. We're hindering that student's progress because we're not giving them the opportunity to practice the skill independently and really demonstrate that mastery and context.

06:15
And on the other hand, if we know that the student is at a lower accuracy, then we're able to go in with the right level of support right off the bat and avoid that frustration. So it really helps us find the sweet spot for where the student needs to start in a session. So this is why I really like to administer those probes right at the beginning of the session. It tells me how I can best support the student. It helps me minimize frustration by making sure that I'm providing enough support, and it also minimizes boredom by helping me make sure that I'm not providing too much support. And of course, I'm going to consider the data within the session to continue adjusting. But having this really quick data point at the beginning of the session really helps set me up for success.

07:11
And I just alternate between. If I have a group of three students, I'll pull up the probes super efficiently.

07:20
SLP Now makes that really easy, but then I'll just rotate between the students. They know the routine, they know what the expectations are. The probes move very quickly and they have a quick activity to keep them busy. That activity, more often than not, is reviewing all of their goals. So they have goal cards that they'll go through. But, yeah, so I'll just alternate between or rotate between the three students, or however many students are in the group, and then I collect the data and use that to come up with a game plan for the session. So if one student is at 0% accuracy and then another student is at 80% accuracy with a different goal, and we're doing a literacy based unit, we might start off the session with a quick review of the other student's goal and do some teaching.

08:16
And these are all, they'll all be language rich activities. So there's still opportunities for generalization, and there's also opportunities for peer modeling.

08:26
Even if that it's not a goal.

08:30
On every student's IEP, it can still be a really beneficial activity. So I may spend some time teaching that one goal, and then when we get to the more contextualized activity for the day, then this other student will have the opportunity to really practice their skill independently, and they can even use it independently during the teaching activity. So if one student has the goal to name items in categories, student A's goal is to name items in categories, and student B has a goal to produce grammatically correct sentences. When I'm teaching the categories and breaking that down for the student. Student B still has the opportunity to produce sentences because it's language rich and there are going to be opportunities to target all of these skills throughout a variety of activities.

09:31
And yeah, I like to have visuals ready to go so that it is easy to scaffold and support when needed, and it's easy to keep track of which goal we're focusing on within any activity. So yeah, that is an overview of how I use probe data, especially in terms of mixed groups and the rationale for collecting data at the beginning of the session, how I analyze the students performance and what decisions I make in the session based on that. So hopefully that was helpful.

10:05
Overview thanks for listening to the SLP now podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your SLP friends. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast to get the latest episodes sent directly to you.

10:19
See you next time!