Speech-Language Library for Curriculum-Based Therapy

All of my students want to succeed in school but their language impairment inhibits their ability to fully grasp the concepts taught in a classroom environment. My students with language impairments often require extra processing time and repeated exposure to fully mastered the concepts being taught.

My students need curriculum-based books to address comprehension and oral expression skills during activities that align with the concepts/theme being taught in their general education classroom.

This selective library will give my students lessons and activities that support and reinforce what they are learning in the classroom while they are in their speech therapy sessions with me. Each of these books were selected to improve specific language goals (sequencing events, retelling story sequence, answering inferential comprehension questions, identifying/stating the main idea) through exposure to general education curricular concepts within the text of that book.

This library was carefully selected to address a variety of social concepts (e.g., friendship; empathy; bullying), scientific concepts (e.g., seasons, gravity; types of land forms), history (e.g., westward expansion; revolutionary war), and genres of literacy (e.g., biographies, narratives, poetry).

Research has shown the literacy-based activities in speech therapy have a greater impact on the students' classroom performance than worksheet activities. In addition, the students are more engaged with books that have characters or events to which that they can relate than with a paper and pencil task that is not contextualized. The books I have selected are engaging, funny, silly, and/or informational and my students will enjoy learning about curricular content through these books and the activities I have planned for them.

I have seen the direct result engagement in the curriculum has on my students’ success in my therapy room. I would like to offer them curriculum-based therapy so this success for be carried with them into their classroom.