Is there really any more important skill in life than communication? Definitely not, but I'm biased! As a speech therapist, I love being able to work with such a wide variety of students in terms of age and skill level, but the drawback is that I need a variety of materials that target their needs while being age-appropriate and engaging--the worst is when they complain, "Not that again!"
My caseload is comprised of preschoolers (which includes brand new 3 year olds) through 5th graders who have been identified as having communications skills that are significantly below the level of their peers and interfere in their ability to participate in academic and social settings as well as classmates.
There are several different areas in which students can qualify for my services: speech sound production (when their speech is hard to understand due to producing sounds incorrectly); language (understanding and use of age-appropriate vocabulary, sentence length and structure; understanding what questions are asking and being able to answer appropriately; understanding, processing, and following auditory directions, etc; and dysfluency (stuttering).
My Project
Most of these materials focus on vocabulary because many of my kiddos are behind with their basic vocabulary acquisition.
These materials will provide a variety of opportunities to "feed" new words to their growing minds.
Flip&Read Site Word Sentences will build on that vocabulary using scripted sentences to model how to combine words into sentences. They will love the hands-on Create-A-Scene Felt Board to help them retell stories and we'll use the Match & Sort Early Reading Comprehension Quickies to address listening comprehension and early literacy skills (identify main ideas, recall details, draw inferences, compare/contrast, and sequence events. And the Dinosaur Big Book-what can I say? Kids LOVE dinosaurs!
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