A Camping we will go! (2) - Camping Theme

Our theme for our first week of camp was "Camping Out." The format was pretty much the same across groups (See previous post for the group makeup), with circle time to start, followed by a focused speech & language task (worksheet etc) then an art & craft activity. Here is the breakdown of our activities for each group, with some pictures and resources. I used this site http://www.kidsparkz.com/camping.html quite a bit for ideas and resources.

Explorers

Circle Time (Around the pretend campfire)

Ipad story "Our camping trip" with questions

Song: A camping we will go

Worksheets

Following Directions:

Camping worksheet from "Say and Glue Language for Listening" by Super Super

Vocab Guessing game: What am I? for camping items

Art & Craft

Colouring and making binoculars out of card, then going on a nature walk talking about what we saw.

Discoverers:

Circle time

Around the campfire with musical instruments, playing along to "She'll be coming round the mountain, then switching and requesting another instrument using, gesture, PECS, vocalisation etc.

Worksheets

Look and find camping scene with bears (Not sure where I got it but was glad to find it on my harddrive). Pointing to the object named within the scene (very simple objects like boat, bear etc).

Artic focus- sticking something beginning with each child's target sound on the camping scene.

Art & Craft

Nature walk to find different leaves, then doing leaf rubbings on paper

(Unfortunately I forgot to take pics on this day)

Busy Bees

Almost Identical Activities to Explorers, only change is we did a listening bingo for camping pictures, then worked on prepositions with a big tent that was set up.

Skill Builders

Circle Time

Camping story with Ipad

Going on a bear hunt action rhyme

I'm going camping and I'm going to take...... memory game

Worksheets

Therasimplicity camping scene for barrier game. I played a listening and following directions game where I handed out different pictures to the children then gave directions like " If you have a green sleeping bag put it next to the campfire". This was a fun one.

Guess what? game, where each child came up and described a camping picture shown to him and the others had to guess what it was.

Art & Craft

Camping scene photo frame with mixed media (tent opens to reveal photo).

Adventurers

Circle time: What noises can we make in the forest (sound sequencing)

Story time (Artic camping story from book, I think it's linguisytems)

Worksheets

working on individual sounds and sticking on camping scene

/s/ blends activity on pathway

Art & Craft

Creating camping scene, then sticking /s/ blends path on scene.

See, I told you it was fun.

Look out for our waterplay week coming soon!

A Camping we will go!

Hello Hello!

I know I have been away for a while. My twitter followers know that I have been promising to write a new blog post for months now, but life and procrastination have gotten in the way. Anyway the good news is that I'm here and IT'S SUMMER!!!!

This summer the Easy Speak clinic has been transformed into Camp Easyspeak, where groups come in for therapy from 9-11am and engage in activities around various themes each week. We have just completed our 3rd week of camp and I am EXHAUSTED having a great time. The children are definitely enjoying it and showing such great improvements in their speech and language skills, and parents are happy so I'm happy. I love group therapy, since the children really motivate each other and you see all these new personalities that you don't get to experience in a 45 min individual session.

I've really been brainstorming and using lots of different online resources to make activities fun and interesting and keep our campers engaged and happy. I'd really like to go into detail in a few more posts about what we've been doing during sessions and offering ideas for group therapy. This post, however, you may think of as a teaser, just a bit of an overview of our activities.

Camp is broken up into different groups, who come different days across the week.

• Monday: Explorers; 4 boys, ages 3-4yo with mild expressive and receptive language delay.
• Tuesday:Discoverers; 3 girls and 2 boys with severe delays. Diagnoses include low functioning ASD, Intellectual Disability, Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy and Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum.
• Wednesday: Busy Bees; 4 boys aged 2-4yo with moderate to severe receptive and expressive language delay, social skills deficits, and behavioural challenges. Diagnoses include "mild autism", PDD-NOS and new CI user.
• Thursday: Skill Builders ; 6 boys aged 5-7, all with suspected or diagnosed high functioning ASD.
• Friday: Adventurers; 3 boys and 2 girls with Phonological Disorders, some with suspected CAS.

Our theme has been the same across groups for each week.

Week 1: Camping theme

Week 2: Water

Week 3: Movement

and our theme for next week is going to be food.

It has been amazing to watch these children work together and interact so well with each other. This particularly with the discoverers who I was a bit hesitant to place together initially, but have created a wonderful group dynamic.

This is our first real " camp" experience at the Easy Speak Clinic and I anticipate bigger and better things to come in the future.

My New Favourite Therapy Tool

Hey everyone!

First of all I'd like to thank you all for your feedback on my last blog post "Green Analogies". I really appreciate it and am glad that you liked my random ramblings. I was able to draw reference to the analogy last night, as I gave a talk to a church congregation on children's speech and language development, and it was well received :)

Those who have been following my blog, would know that I love making resources, and I love when therapy tools can be used for a range of topics. Last week I bought my most useful therapy tool so far: my magnetic white board. It was on sale too!

Everyone loves it and I've been trying to find lots of different ways to use it in therapy. This was aided by my trusty laminator and some adhesive magnetic strip.

I wanted to share with my readers some of the cool uses of my new companion:

This one worked on categorising sky, sea and land, as both a receptive and an expressive task.

This next one is my favourite, as I love the "Five little monkeys" rhyme. The children love that Mr. Crocodile can actually snatch the monkeys off the "tree".

The next one I adapted from a file folder game which works on big and little. Children have to choose the big or little object called, then put it on the appropriate side of the board.

Another one I made up on the spot was for prepositions 'on' vs 'under', which worked a lot better than I thought.

It also came in handy when I had to quickly draw some minimal pairs for /s/ and /n/ in final position, but those ones I definitely won't dare to share (they were ridiculed enough during the session).

These are my newest resources so far for my white board, but I have a few running around in my head which I will try to make over the next week, and share as an update to this post.

I want to hear from you readers. Do you use white boards in therapy? How do you use them?

Thanks for reading :)

Green Analogies

These past few weeks I have been trying my hand at gardening. My mum has a green thumb (see above pic), so I've been wondering if it was in the genes. I bought a subscription to Martha Stewart Magazine and my everyday vocabulary is now filled with words such as seedlings, trellis and all sorts of "garden related" terms. My vegetable garden has started with beans, snow peas, jalapeño peppers, cilantro, and red onions. Every morning I'm out in my garden, admiring the half inch of growth since the previous day, pulling the one weed that's trying to grow up, showing my neighbours and anyone who passes by. I show parents when they come to sessions and have pictures in my phone to show anyone who will listen to my garden stories (and humour me). Yes, I'm a proud mama!

While talking to my plants each day I've been doing some thinking about plant growth and making comparisons to children's language development. Now I've been making parents look through the window at my up and coming gardens for a new reason. It's a really nice visual to provide parents with an analogy on children's language.

I planted all of my seeds on the same day, but as you might be able to see in the pic below, some of them sprouted and grew before the others. The beans sprouted quickly and were up in the air in no time, while I was just staring hopefully at empty beds for a while before I saw even a glimpse of coriander or peppers. Even amongst the beans som

e were growing faster than others. They were receiving the same conditions, nurtured in the same environment, but growing at different rates.

When we look at children's language development, we may have a group of children who are the same age, who have similar nurturing environments, however some may be developing language quickly, whereas for whatever reason some may have delayed language. Som

e plants, like my red onions, may need a bit of a push, or some extra help (e.g fertiliser/plant food) getting them to where we want them to be, wh

ile in the same way parents may need to provide more focused language input or bring them to us friendly, lovable speech therapists, who provide that extra 'nurturing'.

Sometimes we need to ask an expert about what is typical or atypical for growth and development. We may need some assurance that everything is following its natural course of development and just requires time, or someone to highlight the red flags to show that something might be wrong and more needs to be done.

My mum has been my expert gardener, and after dragging her out to my garden yesterday in despair, she shared something with me that I had to share with a parent today. She told me:

"All plants are different; you need to stop comparing them to the other plants and look at what is happening to each individual one. You were so busy focusing on how tall the beans were growing past the others, that you didn't even realise that the cilantro plants have sent out new leaves"

This was true, I had failed to realise that the seedlings which initially looked like little weeds, were now starting to push out new leaves in the middl

e that actually looked like real cilantro leaves. My mothers words reminded me of what I tell parents constantly. Stop focusing on what John and Jane are doing, and look at your child's individual gains, look at his strengths and what he is now able to do that he could not do 2 months ago. You may miss out on some of the most important communication achievements. Words from my garden :)

The last analogy came to me this afternoon, when I looked outside and saw all of my pea plants almost lying on the ground.

I dragged mum outside again (yea she's getting very tired of me and this garden) who showed me that they were not dying to get back at me for talking to the beans more, but actually searching for a support system. In this case our neighbour's fence was the closest thing so they were headed for that. She noted that some plants, although they were growing, needed some type of device to help support their growth and to help them flourish. This evening we made a makeshift trellis or augmentative device to help with their growth. The acronym AAC was going off in my head as she told me this, as we can use these devices to supplement and enhance language development in children. Definitely another one to share with parents.

So there you have my 'little garden that could' and my speech and language therapy ramblings as I pretend to be Martha Stewart. Now to find a way to use it in direct therapy!

A new reason to buy Shoes!!!!

(My Dream Shoe, by Michael Kors)

I love shoes! Just as much as I love shopping for shoes!And you may be asking yourself "what does this have to do with speech & language therapy?"

Well my friends, these two actually go hand in hand, and I promise you'll leave this blog post with a new rationalization for the shoe shopping you do this Easter weekend.

The thing is, after you slip those sparkling, sexy heels on, there's a great therapy resource lying on the floor longing to become one of your prized clinical tools....."the shoebox!"

I started making shoebox therapy tools late last year, when I was looking for a

new way to work on following directions. We had used larger boxes in grad school clinics to make the ever popular posting boxes, but I was looking for something smaller, that could be more easily stored. Thank goodness I had just bought a new pair of pumps. What I made ended up looking like this:

and the children loved it, even more than I had anticipated. I stuck the pictures on, then used a craft knife to cut holes for the mouths. Children are asked to feed pictures of food to the dog vs the frog, and when they put the picture in they are rewarded by a shaking box, and lots of hungry eating noises. For early vocabulary and sentence building I encourage "eat frog", "dog is eating", "the dog is eating icecream", etc, depending on level. I also use it to post artic or language pics, using the same concept of the posting box.

The next way I use my boxes is for categorisation and sorting, particularly with children on the Autistic spectrum. This, however, isn't an original idea, as I

have seen a similar concept on http://www.shoeboxtasks.com/. I have about 3 of these, working on sorting colours, frogs vs turtles and animals vs food, into different containers in the shoebox. These containers fit nicely into holes cut out with my handy craft knife.

Unfortunately most of my boxes are on loan right now to clients, but I have half a box, so to speak, to give an example.

This box is an all time favourite of a little boy with ASD, and at one point was the only real motivator for him in therapy. It was actually the first item I used to teach him PECS.

The original concept was taking the beads out and matching them to the 3 pipe cleaners by colour (red, green, yellow). As you can see he reaaalllyyyy loved this box and used it well. I think it's definitely time to make a new one, which also means it's time for some shoe shopping (see how this works ladies?).

I encourage you this weekend, for the sake of therapy and to really enhance your clinical practice, to go out and buy some shoes. Your clients will thank you for it.

Happy Easter everyone :)

Groups

It has been a tiring two weeks! It has also been fun times at the Easyspeak Clinic!

The children were on an early easter break from school, and I took that time to do something that I've been thinking about and planning for a while now. "Camp Easyspeak" comprised of 2 groups, one social skills group for children with ASD (higher functioning), and a phonology group.

The social skills group was more of my pet project and I was beside myself with happiness to see it actually come off perfectly. This group consisted of 4 boys ages 5-7, who came on Thursdays from 9-11 am. The phono group came on Fridays 9-11 am, and consisted of 2 boys and 2 girls ages 3-5.

For both groups children participated in teamwork activities, arts and craft and free play, working around certain themes.

The phono group went through cycles of some of the sounds they were doing with me in therapy, around an Easter theme. We ended up with some interesting projects like the one below: "Attack of the eggheads!"

I wanted to share more with my readers on my social skills group, and recommend it to any therapist. I was so impressed with how well the boys worked together on all the activities. They were completely different children compared to their 45 minute individual sessions.

I wanted the parents to be fully informed about what was happening at the group, so I gave them a handout that showed what we were working on and what language/social skills areas the task focused on. An example of this can be viewed here.

I made every action and interaction a language/social skills task, from putting down bags, to greetings, to eating snack, to clean up time. There were 2 teams, who were responsible for different tasks around the camp area. We were set up outside on the deck, which provided lots of space for them to move around and an outdoor atmosphere that wasn't too distracting.

One of the most effective tools was my behaviour chart, which had visuals for appropriate behaviours, and gave points for these behaviours. Every 4 ticks got a sticker, which worked very well , as the boys were trying really hard to get their Spongebob stickers. The visuals for the behaviour chart I found at www.sparklebox.co.uk, one of my favourite sites for FREE language and behaviour resources.

Our 2 main activites were "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" sequencing activity, which also incorporated listening for details and 'wh' questions; then our following directions task to make an easter bunny. These were lots of fun and a lot easier than I had expected. Some of the boys really stepped up and offered help to the others, and it was nice to see some asking for help. They made me proud.

All of the parents were very pleased with the groups, and have been asking when the next one is planned for :)

Try it out at your clinic and let me know how it goes :)

Reflections

I remember my grandmother's stroke.

Almost like it was yesterday, and not 12 years ago.

A memory so vivid that I can recall the finest details; the heat of the day, my mother hanging the washing on the line.....washing left in a moment's panic after realising that this was no ordinary day of ordinary chores....

Something had changed, and we were never going to be the same again.

Most importantly I remember the day before, because this was the last day I had a conversation with my grandmother, at least one which made sense.

We talked and joked, and she imparted words of wisdom, taken for granted at the time, but which became so cherished after that.

I remember that phone call, which didn't quite make sense. I was greeted with words, but that's all they were.

Just strings of words carelessly thrown together, flowing from nowhere

No sense.......nonsense.

"Gran, you're not making sense, what's going on?"

"Mum, talk to Gran-Gran, something's wrong"

And so began a whirlwind of events, of tears, of confusion.

A new string of words which made no sense being thrown at me: stroke, hospital, damage to brain...

When all I wanted to hear was the conversation of the day before....words of wisdom, never to be uttered again.

I remember watching her become a shell of herself.

Struggling to say things, to remember things and people, and moments, but nothing coming out right.

I remember wondering what was going on inside her brain.

Where were those pieces that made her who she was?

That made her able to sit and talk and laugh with me and tell me stories about the 'old time days.'

How could all that be lost in a moment?

She was there sitting in front of me, yet I had lost her forever.

On reflection there had never been any mention of a speech therapist.

No one to come and explain language centres, and talk about words like 'aphasia'.

No one to try to help with her comprehension or expression......

To put her back together again.

It was just accepted that this was who she was, and that nothing more could be done.

When my grandmother died a year or so later there wasn't that overwhelming grief that would have been expected, for it was like she had already died on the day of that phone call. I had already lost her then.

Funny enough this wasn't the driving force to make me want to become a speech therapist. It was actually what made me shy away from wanting to work with adults. I felt that every patient who came in with an aphasia would make me relive that moment again, would bring back that feeling of loss I felt on that day.

I can't say it wasn't difficult initially, but after a while it did become a motivator for me.

If I could be that person to bring some clarity to a 14 year old girl about why she could no longer share the same conversations that she used to with her grandmother.

If I could help a grandmother, a grandfather, a parent regain some language skills, or create some bridge to the gaping communication gap in this new, confusing life......

........then I would have made the difference I may have needed 12 years ago.