Tricks Of The Trade

There are a lot of tricks and techniques that we SLPs don't learn in grad school.  I have learned so much from working closely with general education teachers.  They have inspired many of my ideas and a lot of their activities can be translated to speech and language therapy easily.  One thing that I love to do when introducing a theme or when I'm trying to follow the general ed curriculum in my room is to use KWL posters.


Knows-Wants to Know-Learned

This idea is great for teaching vocabulary and concepts.  The first day we discuss the topic and fill in the "K".  What do we already know about the topic at hand? Then we talk about the "W".  What do we want to know about the topic? This is an excellent opportunity to work on sentence structure when asking questions.  I like the kids to come up with a variety of Wh- questions.  After we fill in these two columns, we get to researching.  The research is usually reading a story that is about the topic and doing activities that create conversation about the topic.  At the end of the week we fill out the "L".  What did we learn?  Did we get any of our questions answered? As easy as that you've just targeted your kids goals of using descriptive words, asking questions and answering questions.  The chart doesn't have to be anything fancy either.  The picture above is a dry erase board and I took a dinosaur and sat him on top of the chart. 

Or change it up even more and do a Has-Can-Likes. Here is one I did for penguins. I used a sentence building sheet that included, "A penguin has______.", "A penguin can _______." and "A penguin likes ______." This is an easy way to expand length and complexity of utterances.

If you wanted to get crazy you could even complete a KWL poster and a Can-Have-Like, but that's only if you're feeling like the wild SLP that I know all of you are deep down. :)