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 ...

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 ...

I've always loved reading classic fairy tales with my students. Not only are they great for their narrative structure, but they also play a big role in our culture.  Well, I really lucked out, because look what our librarian's daughter painted on the wall right outside my office!   As I walk to my room with my younger ...

Books continue to be my heroes in my school position, sometimes showing up to save me from ennui when I least expect it. I was recently doing a pull-over sort of session in the literacy center (the kindergarten class is nearby and my room is, well, not), and spied the colorful cover of Alphabet Rescue, by Audrey Wood and her son, Bruce. ...

In last week's blog post, ''The iPad Becomes a wePad for Autism,'' I encouraged you to develop a relationship between the iPad, the child and another person, rather than letting the child with autism treat it as a ''thing.'' Let's call that with the iPad. That's when we can turn it into a wePad and make those applications come alive ...

As kids progress through the grades, the reading material and overall content within the classroom shifts from being narrative or story-based to being more expository. Kids are expected to deal with real-life content and facts and (hopefully) go beyond the basic details to do more advanced thinking within the curriculum. That said, ...

Thanksgiving is now over, and we'll soon be heading toward winter holidays! Today I want to share a subscription website that I am thankful for having rediscovered. I had access to it a few years ago, but it has really improved and I now have more students who can benefit. The website is http://www.new-2-you.com Each week, there is a ...

One of the best ways an SLP in a public school setting can align with classroom contexts is to use picture books related to key curriculum topics. In doing so, we can do interactive read-alouds and emphasize categories, sentence and grammatical structures, vocabulary, story grammar, and balanced literacy strategies (e.g., ...

When I first started to become interested in using picture books as contexts for intervention in my public school SLP position, I was really happy to find Books are for Talking Too, by Jane Gebers. It was clearly just the resource I was looking for at the time - a guide specific to SLPs detailing the power of using picture books. Many great ...

This summer I've been doing a little work for a speech clinic in my town. It's been a lot of fun, and one of the things I love most is their iPad®! I wrote about application of the iPad in speech therapy a few months ago, but I didn't even scratch the surface. I know that other bloggers and readers are much more knowledgeable about this topic ...