#177: Literacy-Based Therapy Bootcamp: Step 4 (Focused Skill Activities)

Marisha
00:00
Hello there, and welcome to the SLP now podcast, where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode.

Marisha
00:20
We are making some serious headway on this challenge. We're already on step four of the literacy based therapy framework, and I've been loving all of your ideas. You guys are rocking it. This is amazing. So we are diving into some focus skill activities today, and we'll be able to use the same kind of approach that we talked about yesterday on the comprehension goals. So if our students have a comprehension goal, and if they don't, the activity that we talked about yesterday is still very language rich, and we can still embed their practice in a meaningful way. And we'll have a little bonus video coming out next week with all of the details on that because I know that can be a little bit overwhelming. But let's just focus in on today on those focus skill activities.

Marisha
01:10
And the first thing that we want to do is just to make sure that students are aware of their goals and that they have buy in, because we can have the most beautiful therapy materials, the most amazing visuals, the best evidence based strategies, and it can still be a flop if we don't have that student buy in and motivation. So we really want to check in with them. What are their goals? What matters to them? What can we use to motivate them and to help them see the value in what we're working on. So that is huge. I personally really like having goal cards. You can do printed versions or you can do this digitally if you're still in the virtual therapy world. But they're just little cards where they write their goals in their own words.

Marisha
01:55
And we do our best to connect it to their longer term goals. Like, what do they want to be when they grow up? And it's made a huge difference in my therapy in addressing behavior issues and just getting students to buy in and to do all the hard work, because this definitely isn't easy. Then the next step is to actually go in and start targeting those skills. So once they know what they're working on, we can dive in and we can use a number of visuals from inside. I really like the ones inside the SLP now membership, but there are absolutely not required before SLP now. I just wrote out and drew my visuals, and I am not an artist, so if I can do it, you can too.

Marisha
02:42
But just something simple, just to break down a skill and make sure that we're really taking the time to teach something. And I mentioned the academy bootcamp courses before, but inside of the SLP now membership, you get access to all of our courses and they're also included in the free trial. So if you haven't already, go check those out if you want some really specific strategies for any specific skills. I do want to keep these videos nice and short, so I'll just stick to the basics. But that is an awesome resource if you are wanting more strategies to use. And so I would just take the time to teach those skills. Once we know what we're working on, we've done that introduction, then we dive into our framework.

Marisha
03:28
So this looks different for every skill, but I'll just give like one or two quick examples and then you can check out the academy or the video coming next week for more details as well. But just for example, I like to pick very language rich activities that allow me to target multiple goals. So for example, with the comprehension activities yesterday, yeah, if I'm asking them questions, it might look like I'm only targeting comprehension. But the sneaky part is that if a student is so one student has a comprehension goal, the other student has a grammar goal. Guess what? When you answer a question, you are producing grammatically correct sentences. At least ideally we are. So we can tag team that activity and use it to target comprehension for one student, and then use it to target grammar for another student.

Marisha
04:22
And then if another student is working on vocabulary, we can throw in some questions that include their vocabulary word, or we can encourage them to use their vocabulary words as they're responding. There's so many ways to combine these activities. As long as it's language rich, we can target any goal. So hopefully that gives you a good starting point. But if you need additional support, like I said, check out the academy. Stay tuned for the video next week. And that's a wrap on day four.

Marisha
04:52
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