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Recognizing the Warning Signs of Social Emotional Difficulties in Language Impaired Toddlers and Preschoolers

emd toddlersToday I am exited to tell you about the new product I created in honor of Better Speech and Hearing Month. 

It is a 45 slide presentation created for speech language pathologists to explain the connection between late language development and the risk of social emotional disturbances in young children 18 months- 6 years of age.

Learning Objectives:

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SPEECH LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT CHECKLIST FOR PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

Today I am excited to tell you about another product in my assessment referral series: SPEECH LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT CHECKLIST FOR PRESCHOOL CHILDREN 

I created this 9 page guide to assist speech language pathologists in the decision making process of how to select assessment instruments and prioritize assessment for preschool children. In doing that you are eliminating the administration of irrelevant tests and focusing on the administration of instruments directly targeting the areas of difficulty that the child presents with. Continue reading SPEECH LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT CHECKLIST FOR PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

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In case you missed it: The importance of targeted assessments for school aged children

Last week I did a guest post for The Simply Speech Blog. In case you missed it,  below I offer an explanation why targeted speech language assessments are so important, as well as list helpful resources that will aid you in speech language assessment preparation.

In both my hospital based job and in private practice I do a lot of testing. During staff/caregiver interviews I used to get a laundry list of both specific and non-specific problems by the parents and teachers, which did not always accurately reflect the students true deficits.  Experience quickly taught me that administering general comprehensive language testing to every student simply did not work. Oftentimes the administration of such testing revealed one of two things: Continue reading In case you missed it: The importance of targeted assessments for school aged children

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In case you missed it: Therapy Fun with Ready Made Spring Related Bingo

Back in late February I did a guest post for Teach Speech 365. In case you missed it I am running it again on my blog since spring is now in full bloom!

Spring is here and there are many fun therapy activities you can do with your preschool and school aged clients during this time of year.  Now, while many of my colleagues are great at creating their own therapy materials, I am personally not that handy.  If you are like me, it’s perfectly okay since there are plenty of free materials that you can find online and adopt for your speech language purposes.

Making Friends, an online craft store, and Boggles World, an online ESL teacher resource, are two such websites, which have a number of ready-made materials, crafts, flashcards, and worksheets that can be adapted for speech language therapy purposes.  One of my personal favorites from both sites is bingo. I actually find it to be a pretty versatile activity, which can be used in a number of different ways in the speech room.

Let’s start with “Spring” bingo from the Making Friends Website, since its well suited for preschool aged children.  The game comes with both call-out cards and 12-4×4 card printable boards that can be printed out on card stock or just laminated. Continue reading In case you missed it: Therapy Fun with Ready Made Spring Related Bingo

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App Giveaway: Are you Sleeping?

Today Thanks to the generosity of Lavelle Carlson of SpeechPathologyApps.com I am giving away multiple copies of their newest app “Are You Sleeping”.

Continue reading App Giveaway: Are you Sleeping?

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IGetItApps Giveaway: I see-quence Social Skills Stories, My Shedules at School and at Home

Thanks to the wonderful generosity of Amy from IGetItApps I am able to bring you the following Mega Giveaway:

3 copies of I see-quence Social Skills Stories

3 copies of  I see-quence My schedules at School

3 copies of I see-quence My schedules at Home

So enter the Rafflecopter Giveaway below and don’t forget to comment on which app you would like to receive if you win! Continue reading IGetItApps Giveaway: I see-quence Social Skills Stories, My Shedules at School and at Home

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Guest Post: How to Jazz up your Speech Therapy Sessions on a Shoestring Budget

Hello Smart Speech Therapy readers!  My name is Lindsey and I started a blog called Word Nerd SpeechTeach in December 2012. I love creating products and sharing the activities that I do with my kids in speech therapy. Today, I am bringing you a blog post about great dollar store finds to jazz up your therapy sessions!

I love the dollar store when it comes to therapy activities. I can’t leave the store without some awesome finds to incorporate into therapy sessions. Recently, I stopped at my local dollar store and (surprise, surprise) found some great items to spruce up my therapy sessions!! Continue reading Guest Post: How to Jazz up your Speech Therapy Sessions on a Shoestring Budget

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New Webinar: Inattention, Hyperactivity and Impulsivity in At-Risk Children: Differential Diagnosis of ADHD in Speech Language Pathology

 Inattentiveness, hyperactivity, and impulsivity are the most common presenting behavioral problems in at-risk children. This workshop will describe select speech language causes of hyperactivity and inattentiveness in children beyond the ADHD diagnosis, including traumatic brain injury, auditory processing disorders, severe language disorders, as well as social pragmatic language deficits.It will review case examples to illustrate the importance of differential diagnosis. Implications for assessment as well as the need for relevant referrals will be discussed.

When: Thursday, January 17, 2013, 4-5 p.m. ET

Where: Your computer*

Presenter: Tatyana Elleseff, MA, CCC-SLP

Cost: FREE

Who Should Attend: Anyone interested in discussing behavioral problems in at-risk children.

How: Register Here

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“Appdapting” Flashcard Apps to Address Social Skills

I have to admit, I don’t really like flashcards. I especially don’t like it when parents or SLPs use flashcards to drill vocabulary in toddlers and preschoolers, much less school aged children. I feel that it produces very limited learnability and generalization. I am personally a proponent of thematic language learning, since it allows me to take a handful of words/concepts and reinforce them in a number of different ways. The clients still get the benefit of information repetition, much like one would get during a typical flashcard drill.  However, they are also getting much more.  Thematic language learning allows the client to increase word comprehension, make connections to real life scenarios,  develop abstract thinking skills, as well as to transfer and generalize knowledge (Morrow, Pressley, Smith, &  Smith, 1997; Ramey, 1995).

However, even though I dislike flashcards, I still don’t necessarily want to give up using them completely, especially because nowadays many different type of image based language flashcards can be found for free as both printables as well as Iphone/Ipad apps.  Consequently, I decided to pick a free flashcard app and adapt it or rather  “appdapt” it (coined by “The Speech Guy”, Jeremy Legaspi, the “Appdapt Guru”) in a meaningful and functional way for my students.

After looking over and rejecting a number of contenders, without a clear plan of action in mind,  I stumbled upon a free app, ABA Flash Cards – Actions by kindergarten.com, which is designed to target verb labeling in ASD children.   When I saw this app, I immediately knew how I wanted to appdapt it.  I especially liked the fact that the app is made for both Ipad and Iphone. Here’s why.

My primary setting is an out of district day school inside a partial psychiatric hospital.  So in my line of work I  frequently do therapy with students just coming out from  “chill out rooms” and “calm down areas”.  This is definitely not the time when I want to bring or use a lot of materials in the session, since in a moment’s notice the session’s atmosphere can change from calm and productive into volatile and complicated.  I also didn’t  want to use a bulky Ipad in sessions with relatively new children on the caseload, since it usually takes a few sessions of careful observations and interaction to learn what makes them “tick”. Consequently, I was looking for an app which could ideally be downloaded onto not just the Ipad but also the Iphone. I reasoned that in unexpected  situations I could simply put the phone into my pocket, unlike the Ipad, which in crisis situations can easily become a target or a missile.

Given the fact that many children with psychiatric disorders present with significant social pragmatic language deficits (Hyter, 2003; Hyter et al 2001; Cohen et al., 1998; Bryan, 1991; Goldman, 1987 ), which is certainly the case for the children on my caseload, I planned on adapting this app to target my students’ pragmatic language development, social problem solving skills as well as perspective taking abilities.

So here are just a few examples of how I appdapted the cards.  First, I turned off the sound, since the visual images were what I was going after.  Then I separated the cards into several categories and formulated some sample questions and scenarios that I was going to ask/pose to the students:

Making Inferences (re: People, Locations and Actions)

iPhone Screenshot 2

What do you think the girl is thinking about?

How do you know what she is thinking?

How do you think she is feeling?

How can you tell?

Where do you think she is?

How do you know?

 

Multiple Interpretations of Actions and Settings: 

iPhone Screenshot 3

 

What do you think the girl is doing?

What else could she be doing?

 

 

 

 

 

boyflowerHow does the boy feel about the flower?

Give me a different explanation of how else can he possibly feel?

 

 

 

 

Who are the boys in the picture? (relationship)

Who else could they be?

What do you think the boy in a blue shirt is whispering to the boy in a red shirt?

What else could he be saying?

How do you know?

 

Supporting Empathy/Sympathy and Developing Peer Relatedness:

How does this child feel?

Why do you think he is crying?

What can you ask him/tell him to make things better?

 

 

 

 

The girl is laughing because someone did something nice for her?

What do you think they did?

 

 

 

 

 

Interpreting Ambiguous Situations:

girlrunning

 

What is the girl doing?

Who do you think is the woman in the picture?

How do you know?

How does she feel about what the girl is doing?

How do you know?

My goal was to help the students how to correctly interpret facial features, body language, and context clues in order to teach them how to appropriately justify their responses. I also wanted to demonstrate to them that many times the situations in which we find ourselves in or the scenes that we are confronted with on daily basis  could be interpreted in multiple ways. Moreover, I wanted to teach how appropriately speak to, console, praise, or compliment others in order to improve their ability to relate to peers. Finally, I wanted to provide them with an opportunity to improve their perspective taking abilities so they could comprehend and verbally demonstrate  that other people could have feelings, beliefs and desires different from theirs.

Since I knew that many of my students had significant difficulties with even such simple tasks as labeling and identifying feelings, I also wanted to make sure that the students got multiple opportunities to describe a variety of emotions that they saw in the images, beyond offering the rudimentary labels of “happy”, “mad”, “sad”, so I took pictures of Emotions Word Bank as well as Emotion Color Wheel courtesy of the Do2Learn website, to store in my phone, in order to provide them with extra support.

                

The above allowed me not only to provide them with visual and written illustrations but also to teach them synonyms and antonyms of relevant words.  Finally, per my psychotherapist colleagues request,  I also compiled a list of vocabulary terms reflecting additional internal states besides emotions (happy, mad) and emotional behaviors (laughing, crying, frowning). These included words related to:  Cognition (know, think, remember, guess), Perception (see, hear, watch, feel), and Desire (want, need, wish), (Dodd, 2012) so my students could optimally benefit not just from language related therapy services but also their individual psychotherapy sessions as well.

I’ve only just began trialing the usage of this app with the students but I have to admit, even though its still the early days, so far things have been working pretty well. Looks like there’s hope for flashcards after all!

References:

———Bryan, T. (1991). Social problems and learning disabilities. In B. Y. L. Wong (Ed.), Learning about learning disabilities (pp. 195-229). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

—Cohen, N. & Barwick, M. (1996) Comorbidity of Language and Social-Emotional Disorders: Comparison of Psychiatric Outpatients and Their Siblings. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 25(2), 192-200.

Goldman, L. G. (1987). Social implications of learning disorders. Reading, Writing and Learning Disabilities, 3, 119-130.

—Hyter, Y. D., et al (2001). Pragmatic language intervention for children with language and emotional/behavioral disorders. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 23(1), 4–16.

Hyter, Y. D. (2003). Language intervention  for children with emotional or behavioral disorders. Behavioral  Disorders, 29, 65–76.

Morrow, L. M., Pressley, M., Smith, J.K., & Smith, M. (1997). The effect of a literature-based program integrated into literacy and science instruction with children from diverse background. Reading Research Quarterly, 32(1), 54-76.

Petersen, D. B., Dodd, J & Finestack, L. H (2012, Oct 9) Narrative Assessment and Intervention: Live Chat. Sponsored by SIG 1: Language Learning and Education. http://www.asha.org/events/live/10-09-2012-narrative-assessment-and-intervention/

Ramey, E. K. (1995). An integrated approach to language arts instruction. The Reading Teacher, 48(5), 418-419.

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Stimulating Language Abilities of Internationally Adopted Children: Fun with Ready-Made Fall and Halloween Bingo

  There are many fun language based activities parents can do at home with their newly (and not so newly) internationally adopted  preschool and school aged children in the fall. One of my personal favorites is bingo. Boggles World, an online ESL teacher resource actually has a number of ready made materials, flashcards, and worksheets which can be adapted for such purposes. For example, their Fall and Halloween Bingo comes with both call out cards and a 3×3 and a 4×4 (as well as 3×3) card generator/boards. Clicking the refresh button will generate as many cards as you need, so the supply is endless! You can copy and paste the entire bingo board into a word document resize it and then print it out on reinforced paper or just laminate it.

Fall vocabulary words includecorn, crops, farmer, scarecrow, apples, acorns, oak leaf, maple leaves, ginkgo leaves, grapes, mushrooms, salmon, geese, squirrel, jacket, turkey, Jack-O’-Lantern, rake, pumpkins, harvest moon, hay, chestnuts, crow, and sparrow

Halloween vocabulary words includewitch, ghost, skeleton, skull, spider, owl, Jack-O’-Lantern, devil, cobweb, graveyard, clown, pirate, robot, superhero, mummy, vampire, bat, black cat, trick or treaters, alien, werewolf

Now the fun begins!

Some suggested activities:

Practice Vocabulary Labeling: Label the words for newly adopted IA children and get them to say the words after you.

Practice Simple Sentences: Make up simple sentences such as A spider lives in a cobweb or  A squirrel is eating an acorn.

Practice Rhyming:  what rhymes with cat/bat/ trick/leaf/ rake/moon?

For those children who are having articulation (speech) difficulties practice saying  words with select sounds (/ch/, /sh/, /l/, etc) to improve their  intelligibility (pronunciation)

Practice Categorization Skills: Name some fall words, Halloween words, name some popular halloween costumes, name some popular fall activities, etc

Practice naming Associations: what goes with a witch (broom), what goes with a squirrel (acorn), etc

Practice expanding vocabulary by providing Attributes (object characteristics):  Take a noun-word (thing) such as “squirrel” and answer some questions about it: what is it? what does it do? where do you find it? what are its parts? What color/shape is it? does it make any sounds? what goes with it.  Here’s one example, (I see a pumpkin. It’s a fruit/vegetable that you can plant, grow and eat. You find it on a farm. It’s round and orange and is the size of a ball. Inside the pumpkin are seeds. You can carve it and make a jack o lantern out of it).

Practice expanding language by providing relevant  Definitions: Tell me what a skeleton is. Tell me what a scarecrow is.

Practice improving their Problem Solving abilities by naming Similarities and Differences among semantically related items: How are pumpkin and apple alike? How are they different?

Help them understand that many words can have more than one meaning and  explain Multiple Meaning words to them:   A bat, witch, clown, can mean _____ and also mean _________

So join in the fun and start playing today! 

Resources:

Bogglesworld Halloween Bingo Board and Cards http://bogglesworldesl.com/halloweenbingo.htm

Bogglesworld Fall Bingo Board and Cards http://bogglesworldesl.com/autumn_bingo.htm