We did it!! What worked with my preschool and elementary school aged kids???
I was at a total loss when everything shut down and we were left to work online with our clients. For people who know me, I will agree that I’m definitely not technologically savvy. I learned through trial and error along with my wonderful kids and parents.
My gut instinct as a speech-language pathologist kicked in with all the ideas and creativity flowing in. I went back and started using some of my favorite things with few modifications to adapt quickly to each of my clients needs in their functional environment. I would like to share some of my activities, I have been utilizing during my therapy sessions with kids to facilitate language and speech goals.
- Use of Books: You can read aloud to the child, share the book online, or read together books which you both have at home. I found this more beneficial since they are always shocked to find out that we both have similar books. They learn to look at pictures together and turn pages while paying attention to the book.
Goals:
- Vocabulary building.
- Identifying and labeling nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions.
- Finding letters.
- Rhyming words.
- Introducing new vocabulary.
- Early literacy skills.
- Use of wordless books to facilitate imagination and creativity.
For older age groups, we can work on reading comprehension, sequencing the story/ passage, inferring information, identifying the main idea, supporting details, and predicting what will happen next?
- Use of Bubbles:
Goals:
- Gross motor activity paired with simple routine language ( e.g., pop bubbles, stomp bubbles, kiss bubbles, clap bubbles, blow bubbles).
- Work on expanding the length of utterances.
- Articulation goals working on different sounds while popping bubbles.
For older age groups, we can make bubbles and carry out an experiment.
Goals:
- Sequencing the experiment.
- Inferring what will happen?
- Answering a variety of – Wh questions.
- Following multi-step directions.
- Predicting the outcome.
- Taking turns.
- Initiating and clarifying information.
- Formulating grammatically correct sentences and writing the sequential experiment.
