Language Literacy Planning for Simplicity: that is my tag line for planning my teletherapy language lessons this coming school year. I’m venturing into my fourth year as a part time telepractitoner and increasing hours at a new company: Lighthouse Therapy, so that means rebuilding my virtual library. This is a welcome change for me working with someone knowledgeable, trustworthy, and an all around decent human being: Janet Courtney. However, I’m a type A+++ person and it makes me anxious thinking about building therapy queues as the ones I previously used will remain with that dormant therapy room. That’s OK, I have a plan and it will force me to develop more treatment sessions rather than rely on planning games and flipping through flashcards.
My plan isn’t anything new or ground breaking, in fact, I’m sure SLPs all over the world follow the same format. I’m going to structure my language sessions around books. See, I told you that it wasn’t anything earth shattering, but let’s get back to my type A+++ personality. I spent some time over the last couple weeks planning my language sessions from September through May appropriate for children with reading comprehension levels from kindergarten to third grade. Follow this link to view my language excel sheet.
In addition to watching/reading stories via You Tube, I also like using Storyline Online for read alouds. While clients listen to the story, I will have them complete pages from the “Any Book Companion” packet that my colleague and friend, Maureen at the Speech Bubble so cleverly created years ago. For teletherapy purposes, I will likely need to email the applicable page to the parent or on-site assistant who helps clients log in for sessions. You can find this product in her Teachers Pay Teachers Store at this link.
I’m assuming that writing down the speech and language targets will take all of 30 minutes, so we will use the next session to review the word list and drill practice targets in games while referencing the story.
The following week, I will play the story from the previous week once more for listening purposes and then use my virtual materials library of board games and worksheets to supplement learning. This way, clients still get a chance to “play” and I can maintain buy in for my services.
After two weeks, I will start all over again with a new book. I’ll just peek at my spreadsheet and find the next title. As luck would have it, the ever-talented and bright, ray of sunshine, Jenn Alcorn of Crazy Speech World, has launched a virtual book club to share her suggestions for seasonal text throughout the school year. It is a gift that she is sharing her knowledge and lesson plans with the world, so don't miss the opportunity to join the group for monthly emails at Book Club for Speech Therapy.
