Language Therapy and Leadership for Pediatric Clinicians
One of the most effective and efficient ways to help our students generalize skills is to build their metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness. The articles in this section will show you how to add this “meta” focus so you can build strong language skills.
“Never start a sentence with a conjunction!” Have you ever heard this mantra? Or have you ever said it yourself? I confess I’m guilty as charged. There were times I’d try ANYTHING to get my students to understand something in the moment. But…the problem with that little conjunctions jingle I just mentioned is that it’s about…
Everyone loves an epic grammar or syntax fail. There’s this one that shows how a simple comma can be the difference between life and death: “Let’s eat Grandpa.” Or this one that’s been floating around the internet (which shows how important it is to know what is and isn’t a coordinating conjunction): “Everyone’s got a right to…
SLPs are in a position to make a huge impact on our students’ language skills. But here’s the challenge a lot of us face when it comes to helping our students: Most of us are so good at using language, we use it without thinking. Over time we lose the ability to explain HOW we…
If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me for some good “comprehension” and “inferencing” techniques for kids with language disorders, I could retire and buy a private island. If I had another dollar for every article I saw on Pinterest about “reading comprehension”, “main idea”, “inferencing” for language therapy I could probably…
Does it seem like your students never make REAL, measurable progress in language therapy? Do you want to finally start writing progress reports that look like this: Instead of writing updates that look like this: Let’s face it. A lot of us find ourselves writing “not making progress” on a lot of our language therapy…
One of the biggest challenges we face when working with kids with language disorders is getting them to say longer sentences that clearly communicate their ideas. Yet expanding sentences our students say is easier said than done, which is why I created this free e-book for SLPs, The Ultimate Guide to Sentence Structure. In this…
It’s painfully obvious to point out that vocabulary development is critical during the school age years, and equally obvious to say that we need to make a conscious effort to address it with our students. What’s less obvious is how we determine what is “normal vocabulary development”. How can we crawl in to someone’s head…
Semantic feature analysis is a vocabulary-building strategy that builds storage and retrieval, boosts metalinguistic awareness skills, and teaches students to define and describe words in a way that’s EFFICIENT, and EFFECTIVE. Many of us know how to do semantic feature analysis for nouns, but we know that our students need to know verbs and adjectives…
Even though I don’t like to admit it, there were times throughout the early years of career that I’ve felt totally confused about my role in language and literacy. If you have experienced this too, you know that feeling this way can make it really hard to do your job. It wasn’t until I went back…
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone through my students’ writing samples and wanted to pull my hair out. Sometimes it’s such a disaster I don’t even know where to start. The grammar is a mess. Spelling errors are everywhere. And their writing is filled with words like “stuff”, “things”, or my personal…