Over the last 2 weeks a group of upper elementary girls and I have enjoyed an app named Cookie Next Door-Rainy Days. This app is essentially an animated cartoon to which students provide the narrative using their voices. Cookie is a little guy who takes to the ocean on his boat and encounters an adventure with other characters including a huge ...

Valentine's Day is the perfect time to review social skills and talk about friendship. A favorite curriculum for the younger children we serve is ''Good Talking Words'' by Lucy Hart Paulson and Rick van Den Pol. I love how this curriculum picks some simple key social concepts, and uses children's books to illustrate them. The ...

With only a month left to go in this school year, I thought I better get back to a blog I wrote way back at the beginning of the school year.  I had talked about four new approaches/therapy models/interventions that I'd be using this year — so far I've only blogged about two of them (Behavior Management Through Adventure and using the ...

When do you elicit a language sample? Certainly when you first see a child you would want to take a language sample. However, if the child is not comfortable on the initial assessment, there is nothing written in stone that says that it has to be completed the first time around. That in itself should tell you something. I feel that ...

Every kid can benefit from the kind of positive reinforcement offered by the phrase, ''You did it!'' especially if it is offered in an exuberant voice. I say this because lately with a number of my younger and developmentally younger students I have been using the interactive book app Pat the Bunny, and the positive reinforcement ...

Thank you! A special thank you to all of the SLPs who emailed pictures of their beloved pets to include in collages that we can all use to elicit language samples. It was so much fun to see the variety of who lives with you. I was amazed to find who shares your affection, and I know now to whom you talk to each night after work! These are ...

A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing Amazon, and a ''Recommended for You'' item popped up. It was the book, ''The Pirate Who Couldn't Say 'Arrr'''! I am trying to be a school-SLP-on-a-budget, but I couldn't resist. I impulsively clicked on the ''1-Click'' ordering button, and the book arrived two days later. The book is by Angie ...

I have spent a fair amount of time here complaining about winter, so it's a good time to let you know that I LOVE St. Patrick's Day, mostly because to me it is the beginning of spring. Also, I am Darn Well Irish (the MacSweeneys, one of them being my grandfather, hail from County Cork, Ireland). This is sort of a weird holiday to target ...

Dear Kathie: ''Chad is 5 years old and ‘very' autistic and non-verbal. He covers his ears with his hands when there is a loud noise, such as a fire alarm, or even when he anticipates a loud noise, like a balloon that he thinks may pop. How can I help him, his classroom teacher, and his parents? - Payton, speech-language pathologist My ...

In my previous post, I mentioned the quiet winter we have had in the northeast, and how I don't mind it at all! However, it's always nice to have a ''snow day'' school cancellation to let you catch up on work (or relaxation). Snow Day, by Patricia Lakin and Scott Nash, is a cute little picture book in which a group of kids with the ...