It's that time of year again, back to work after that very welcome winter break. I'm ready to go back to school and begin the year with a winter/penguin theme. I plan to align them to the Common Core Standards while addressing my speech and language goals and objectives. I am VERY excited to have discovered this amazing website: ...

I'm sure we are all more than ready for Thanksgiving next week! This year, I'm offering thanks for my wonderful SLP team! There are times when it's difficult to be the only SLP in a building, and it's so nice to meet with the district group for our monthly (and sometimes more frequent) meetings. In my district there are 7 of us, and I admire ...

A month or so ago, I attended an iPad conference, and not only learned a ton about selecting apps for speech therapy, but also other ways to use the iPad. My favorite trick is the screenshot. It's so easy to do, you just press power at the top right of the iPad, and the ''home'' button at the same time. You will see a flash on your screen and ...

In my last entry, I had attempted to include some visuals to support teaching of our schoolwide expectations. Those inadvertently were left out, so I'm going to link to them through Boardmaker Share. Go to the examples below to see one which I created to help children with lower language skills understand the rules of our ''tunnel'' ...

I always debate on whether or not to give my students summer packets.  Although I'm a big believer in a good school/home connection I have often spent many hours putting packets together, only to discover that no one has opened them during the summer. This year, I tried something different. I sent out a survey to the parents of my students ...

It's ALMOST the end of school. Many of you are wrapping up paperwork, but out on the west coast, we have time to squeeze out one more theme. Mine is going to be the Summer Olympics! If you don't have time now, you could do it when you go to school and it's fresh in the minds of your students. There are so many free Olympics themed resources on ...

Flash back about 25 years. To a school-based SLP, he'd be described as a child who stutters. There appears to be a genetic component to his stuttering, as his oldest sister demonstrated some mild stuttering at his age. He is the youngest of four children. It's a noisy household with lots of competition to talk and be heard. The severity of his ...

Last time, I blogged about being a member of a state speech-language-hearing association. In that blog I mentioned my state association's upcoming annual convention. Today's post is about some of my experiences at the PSHA Convention. I'll write about the other presentations I attended in my next post. My time at the convention was split among ...

Many children we work with do not see a link between their behavior and immediate positive consequences they can receive, let alone the connection between their behaviors and their long-term impressions on others. As SLPs, these students can be challenging in many ways, not only because it can be difficult for us to get them to participate in ...

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 ...