Do you struggle with students carrying over their skills to the classroom? Save these ideas for later in the year. When you think of carryover, one of the things we want our students to do is to be able to recreate the same skills in a variety of environments. So it makes sense to practice skills away from your speech room or in different environments.
If you are like me, you spend a lot of time at the table. I used to think that I was pretty active throughout my day because I work with a lot of younger clients. Then I got a fitness tracker. It was pretty sad when I realized I was only getting about 2000 steps during my 10 hour work day. Ugh. Now I’m always trying to sneak steps into my speech sessions.
A few weeks ago, I participated in an amazing blog hop where my fellow speech language pathologists provided a ton of ideas for targeting language skills across your school building. If you missed it, check it out HERE. I’m going to use the information to train para professionals in my schools so that we can carryover language activities throughout the day. Today, I wanted to talk about moving away from your speech table to some unique areas to increase motivation and assess if your students are able to carryover skills to different environments. Plus these are pretty simple ideas with minimal prep.
Speech space #1: Have a pool day
I actually don’t like water play with younger students-but this hard backed plastic pool created a fun area to “trap” my clients in so that I could work on drill activities. I also used the old standby of attaching metal paper clips to cards and having them fish for cards from my pool.
Speech space #2: Hide under the table
This activity came about after I injured my tailbone and couldn’t sit for about a week. I was laying on my side or on my back with my clients all week. Nothing wrong with taping some pictures to the top of your table-or even the top of your ceiling if you can reach it.
Speech space #3: Climb the stairs
Do you have stairs in your house? I love using them for drill practice. Check out my scientific (not at all) Stairticulation model.
Speech space #4: Hang out in a tent
There’s something about a small space that is really appealing for a lot of my clients. If I put up a tent, we can sit in it and do drill activities-they think it’s super fun.
Do you have a funny or unique speech space where you’ve set up a treatment session? Let me know by commenting below.
