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Welcome to another episode of the SLP Now podcast! This week, we’re kicking off a six-week series about literacy-based therapy plans that you can use across your entire school-aged caseload. 💪
Over the next several weeks, we’ll explore various units designed to engage and support students across multiple age groups and skill levels. Whether you’re an experienced speech-language pathologist or new to the field, we hope that these episodes will provide valuable insights and practical strategies for your caseload.
Today, we’re going to start with an early language book!
These resources offer simpler stories tailored to young learners who may be developing foundational language skills. Our goal is to create a play-based approach that fosters engagement and facilitates language acquisition in a fun and interactive way.
For our early language unit, we’re going to use a very Spring appropriate book called *Lola Plants a Garden*. We’ll walk through each step of Dr. Ukrainetz’s literacy-based therapy framework, providing you with actionable guidance and plenty of ideas to implement in your sessions.
Let’s get started! 🌸
Step 1: Pre-Story Knowledge Activation
Before we dive right into the book, it’s essential to take stock of your students’ prior knowledge and familiarize them with key concepts related to the story. This step sets the stage for comprehension and engagement throughout the unit, and it gives students the knowledge they need to be successful.
One of my favorite activities is to do a book walk, where you can familiarize the students with the book before you start reading.
If you have the physical book in your hand, you can show students the cover and then flip through a few pages to identify any familiar objects and actions. For example, do they recognize flowers or understand the concept of planting a garden?
Depending on your students’ language abilities, you can adjust the level of support and scaffolding provided during this activity.
It can also be really helpful to incorporate virtual field trips or hands-on play-based experiences to enrich students’ understanding and vocabulary. Whether you’re watching videos of children gardening on YouTube or actively exploring nature, there are so many ways you can introduce the book and its main themes while setting students up for success with the rest of the unit.
When working with younger students it might be helpful to do more play-based activities, especially if they need a little more information to engage with the content. In that case, you could find a song on YouTube about flowers or gardening, and incorporate movement or act things out to help ingrain those vocabulary concepts and give your students lots of exposure.
You could also bring in pictures of flowers and do different activities around describing them, or asking questions about the flowers and modeling utterances. If your students learn with tactical activities or sensory play, you can even bring in a little plastic or felt garden kit. There are so many options!
Throughout this step, the goal is to model vocabulary, basic concepts, and grammar targets while also encouraging students to express their thoughts and observations—and recasting their productions as needed.
The opportunities for language-rich activities are endless, and by building a strong foundation of pre-story knowledge, you pave the way for deeper comprehension and meaningful interactions during the reading and beyond. ✨
Which brings us to step two of Dr. Ukrainetz’s framework:
Step 2: Read the Book
Once students are familiar with the story’s context, it’s time to read the book!
Whether you have access to the physical book or take advantage of online resources like YouTube videos, ensure that all students can follow along and actively engage with the text. 💪
One of the great things about using a YouTube version of the books is the ability to share the links with parents, teachers, or other members of the students’ support team. There is a lot of research demonstrating that multiple readings improve comprehension, and the YouTube links mean our students can get exposures to the book outside of the speech room.
Reading aloud offers so many benefits including exposure to new vocabulary, comprehension practice, and auditory processing skills.
As you read, be sure to pause to discuss illustrations, predict what might happen next, and encourage students to make connections to their own experiences.
And, for students with visual impairments or other accessibility needs, consider providing alternative formats such as tactile books or digital versions with audio descriptions. The goal is to make the reading experience inclusive and enjoyable for all learners.
Step 3: Post-Story Comprehension
After completing the book, we’re going to take some time to assess students’ comprehension and reinforce key concepts through targeted questioning and discussion. This step gives us valuable insights into students’ understanding of the story, and helps to reinforce their learning.
Using question cards or prompts tailored to different comprehension levels, you can use step three to guide students in recalling details, summarizing the plot, and making inferences about characters’ motivations and actions.
By offering multiple-choice answers or visual supports, you can scaffold the task and accommodate diverse learning needs—which makes this perfect for working with mixed groups.
You can encourage students to share their thoughts and opinions, fostering critical thinking and communication skills. Through meaningful dialogue and reflection, students have the opportunity to deepen their engagement with the text and develop confidence in expressing themselves.
Step 4: Focused Skill Activities
Now that our students have a solid understanding of the story, it’s time to dig into focused skill practice and start targeting specific language goals. This step allows you to customize activities and interventions based on students’ individual needs and areas of growth.
For Marisha, step four tends to be the longest section of the unit because that’s when we are really digging into our students’ goals. It’s not uncommon for her to spend several sessions on focused skill activities.
Because we’re working with early language skills here, it’s helpful to incorporate a variety of play-based activities, like vocabulary games or role-playing scenarios, to keep students involved and engaged.
In SLP Now, we have a whole list of receptive and expressive language skills—and we have them leveled—plus a handful of play-based ideas to help you target those goals at all the different levels.
Let’s walk through a few examples:
- You can use vocabulary cards or actual tangible props and supports to reinforce word recognition and categorization skills
- Get creative and play hide-and-seek! Move items around the room to make the activity more engaging for your students
- To target basic vocabulary, like body parts, you can put a flower (from Lola’s garden of course!) on your head, shoulders, or even under your feet
- You can also work on responding to questions or describing goals by using different types of flowers and asking which one is small or which one is yellow—or ask your students to describe the size and color of each flower if you’re offering various levels of support
The possibilities really are endless!
Of course, it’s important to consider the pacing and structure of your sessions, making sure you have enough time for direct instruction, guided practice, and independent exploration.
By providing multiple opportunities for repetition and reinforcement, you support your students’ skill acquisition and generalization across contexts. 🙌
Step 5: Parallel Story
Let’s wrap up the unit with Marisha’s favorite step: creating a parallel story! This activity encourages creativity, language production, and narrative development as students reimagine the story through their own perspectives.
You can provide students with prompts or visual aids to help them generate ideas and organize their thoughts. Encourage collaborative storytelling and teamwork to foster a supportive and inclusive learning environment.
Whether students choose to write, draw, or act out their parallel stories, emphasize the importance of narrative structure and the key components of storytelling—like setting, characters, and plot progression.
Honestly, students have so much fun with this step. They get really involved with choosing images, and are super proud when they have a finished project to take home and show off.
The very best part? You get to do your favorite thing: celebrate each student’s unique contributions and creativity, highlighting their strengths and achievements. 🎉
And that wraps up our early language literacy-based unit, Lola Plants a Garden!
Remember: the framework outlined here is meant to serve as a flexible guide for to help you put together effective therapy plans that will carry you through an entire month. By incorporating elements of play, exploration, and meaningful interaction, you can create engaging and impactful learning experiences for your students.
While our favorite therapy planning resource is SLP Now, know that you can absolutely implement this without investing in our membership!
Our goal is to offer you ideas to consider, and we hope that you have access to the resources you need to make this literacy-based magic happen without making any purchases. YouTube and a solid Google image search can be your best friend.
Whether you’re working with early language learners or students with more advanced communication skills, the principles of literacy-based therapy remain consistent. So keep experimenting, adapting, and refining your approach to meet the diverse needs of the students on your caseload, and don’t hesitate to seek out additional resources and support along the way.
We hope this unit inspires you to embrace the power of storytelling and play in your speech-language therapy sessions with early learners.
Stay tuned for future episodes in this series, where we explore more evidence-based units and strategies to to help you target your students’ goals—across all the ages on your caseload.
You’ve got this, SLP!
Links and Additional Resources
#174: Literacy-Based Therapy Bootcamp: How to Pick a Book
#175: Literacy-Based Therapy Bootcamp: Step 1 (Pre-Story Knowledge) and Step 2 (Reading)
#176: Literacy-Based Therapy Bootcamp: Step 3 (Post-Story Comprehension)
#177: Literacy-Based Therapy Bootcamp: Step 4 (Focused Skill Activities)
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Transcript
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.
This week we are diving into a month of therapy plans for an early language book, and this is the beginning of a six week series where we will dive into units that you can use across your whole school age caseload.
00:40 So I'm really excited. We're going to be doing picture book, nonfiction article, fiction article, even vocational units, science experiments, all of that good stuff. So stay tuned for the rest of the series. And like I said, we are starting off today with an early language book, and early language books include simpler stories that students really love. And this unit type is ideal for students who might not be ready to sit through a longer story, who are working on more foundational language skills, and who benefit from more of a play based approach. And if you'd like a list of recommended units for your caseload. If you're not sure, should I choose early language or should I wait to hear about the picture book? If you're not sure, check out the show notes at slpnow.com/183. Again, that's slpnow.com/183.
01:42 There's also a link in the description for this episode, but you'll find all of the show notes. So any resources or links that I mentioned throughout this episode, you'll be able to find them again at slpnow.com/183. But you will also find a link to a two minute quiz. Super short and sweet. If you take that quiz, we will send you a list of recommended units for your caseload.
02:11 And like I said, if you go to the show notes, you'll find tons of other resources for this unit as well. But without further ado, let's dive in. We are going to be reading, and we won't actually read it in this episode, but this hypothetical unit is for Lola Plants a Garden, which is a story about a girl who plants a garden. It's a very simple read. It can be read in about two to three minutes, so it's really great.
02:41 For those preschoolers or kindergartners who don't quite have the attention span to sit through a slightly longer book. And it doesn't include a complete story grammar episode. So it does not include a complete story grammar episode. But the story includes really nice illustrations and it's a great context to target basic vocabulary, basic concepts. There are lots of actions in the book, plus a number of characters.
03:11 So it's really great for those grammar goals because you'll have lots of great pictures to use to target those goals because there's all those actions. It's really great for verbs, irregular, past tense verbs. There are a lot of those in the book. There's a mom and her daughter, and then she has three friends that come over, and two of them are boys. So there's a mix of characters that you can work on, too. So I listed some of the goals that we can target throughout the unit, like basic vocabulary, basic concepts. This is really great for those early kind of MLU goals as well, answering questions, describing, any of those grammar goals.
03:54 It's just a really great context for a number of goals, following simple directions, early prepositions as well, which falls under basic concepts, and then just naming basic items, which goes under basic vocabulary. So lots of our early language goals, I'll be focusing on the goals that I just listed.
04:14 But you can use this book to target any goal.
04:18 And of course, it helps if the book is appropriate for your caseload. So we'll start there. But if you decide that this book is appropriate, then you can use it to target any goal. You can do social language. There's some nice emotions in here as well, so tons of opportunities.
04:35 So let's dive into the actual unit. So I use Dr. Ukrainetz's five step literacy based therapy framework for all of my units, and so we are going to walk through those five steps. If you need a refresher on the five steps, I'll include a link in the show notes, and then you can get a little bit more context there. But hopefully I'll do a good job explaining it so it still makes sense. So the first step in the framework is pre story knowledge activation.
05:07 So what I would do in this.
05:09 Step is I would do a book walk. So a book walk includes, if you have the actual book, you would look.
05:16 At the COVID and maybe look at.
05:18 A couple of pages just to get a feel for if the students have anything to say, especially if they're not quite combining a lot of words, are they able to name or label any of the items? Or if they are putting together longer utterances, what can they tell us? Do they know what flowers are?
05:39
Do they know any of those actions?
05:42
And depending on how much the students are able to express, I will spend more or less time in step one. But one activity that I really like to do, even if they are able to give me some words and kind of demonstrate some understanding of the topic, I think a virtual field trip is a really fun way to it's a.
06:04
Language rich activity, so we can use.
06:07
That as again, another context to target their goals, but then it helps build the knowledge to set them up for success for the rest of the unit. So an example of a virtual field trip that you might use. There are a lot of YouTube videos.
06:25
About kiddos, like giving tours of their.
06:28
Gardens or planting gardens. And so in the show notes I'll include an example of a virtual field.
06:34
Trip that you could use, but that.
06:36
Is a really fun thing to watch. The kiddos love doing that, and it's also a language rich activity and this is going to be true of every single thing that I tell you throughout this episode. All of the activities are language rich.
06:54
So we can use any of these activities to target any goal.
07:00
So as we're doing the book walk, we can use that as an opportunity to model vocabulary concepts, grammar targets and whatever else comes up. And then the same thing goes for.
07:12
The virtual field trip. And as the students start producing more.
07:17
Targets, we can use recast.
07:19
So all of that has lots of.
07:22
Great evidence around those approaches and we can use them for all of those activities. And if students are working on answering questions, we can have them respond to questions while we're doing that. So opportunities are endless.
07:35
Another thing, because I'm working with younger.
07:39
Students in this series, I might do some more play based activities, especially if.
07:45
They need a little bit more information.
07:48
I might find a song on YouTube about flowers or gardening and incorporating movement and acting things out to help ingrain those vocabulary concepts and give them lots of exposure. I might bring in pictures of flowers and do different activities around that, like describing them or asking questions about the.
08:13
Flowers and modeling utterances and all of that you can bring in.
08:20
If you happen to have a gardening kit, you could do some sensory play around that. I have just a little plastic garden kit, I guess, that has a couple of fake plant pots and a couple of fake flowers and plants, and we're able to put those together so I.
08:37
Can share a link to that as well.
08:40
But there's lots and lots of options on things that we can do, and.
08:43
This might be we can decide whether we want to use it in step.
08:48
One or if it would be a better activity to save for step four.
08:53
Which we'll get to really soon, but I'll share more specific ideas, but just.
08:59
Throwing some ideas out there then. Early language units look a little bit different than the other ones, so I'm excited for you to hear the picture.
09:08
Books and fiction articles and all that, too. And then step two is read.
09:14
So this is when we read the book. And if you don't have access to. If you aren't able to get the book from the library or you're not.
09:22
Able to purchase it, these books are.
09:25
Available on YouTube, and there's like a three minute video of someone reading the book, so you can use that. And I love the YouTube version of.
09:35
The books as well because I can.
09:38
Share it with the parents and the teacher because there's a lot of research.
09:42
Around multiple readings of a book and.
09:45
Sharing the YouTube video. It's really easy for parents to just play that video before bed or when they're doing homework or whatever it might look like.
09:56
So that's a really great opportunity there, too.
10:01
Then step three is post story comprehension.
10:06
So this is where we have the.
10:09
Opportunity to ask some questions about the book to target comprehension. Even if the students don't have comprehension goals, it's a great opportunity to practice that skill.
10:20
And in SLP Now, I was really excited about these when we made them because I always had a hard time finding this. So a lot of times, students have a hard time responding. A lot of activities have a mix of who, what, when, where, why, and the complexity of the questions is all over the board, and it's really hard to target that with students who are just getting all of the words confused and all of that.
10:48
So I wanted a simpler kind of hierarchy of activities. And so we have separate who questions, what questions, when questions, where questions in the materials for this unit. And so there's a page or a section for each of those, and then the questions have multiple choice answers. So it makes it really accessible and really easy to scaffold for a wide range of students.
11:16
So I've used this with all types of students, and it's been a really fun activity. And you can minimize the field of choices if you need to. You can even just give them one of the choices and see if they can label the answers. There's so many options there. So you can use this activity to easily target even those, like any of the goals that we listed before.
11:39
So that would be step three. And then for step four is our focus skill practice.
11:46
And this is the longest section of the unit where we really get to dive into all of the students goals.
11:54
So I'll share a handful of ideas of what this could look like. And that reminds me, too. I always get questions about the timing of the unit. So for this hypothetical group that I'm sharing, we might spend one session on pre story knowledge activation, where we do the book walk, we do the virtual field trip, and maybe we do some play based activities to get familiar with.
12:18
What gardening looks like and all of that.
12:22
Then in the next session, and this is assuming we have, like it's school based SLP, maybe a group of about three students. Then the next session, we would read the book and then do the comprehension activities. And that would probably take me about a session as well. And you can listen to the other episodes. I'll put it in the show notes too, about how I structure each individual session within a unit.
12:51
But just a quick recap.
12:52
I like to start off with a quick probe, and then that takes just a couple of minutes. And then based on the probe, I'll do some initial teaching.
13:01
And then we'll dive into the more contextualized activities, which includes the reading and the comprehension in this case. And then we wrap up the session, I wrap up my documentation and move on to the next group. But yeah, if you have more questions about that, I'll share that in the show notes as well.
13:19
Then for step four, again, like I said, we'll spend several sessions here and I'll share some different ideas. So for this unit in SLP now, we have a list of receptive and expressive language skills, and we have them leveled. And then we have a handful of play based ideas to help you target those goals for all of those different levels.
13:45
And it's broken down again, like I said, by receptive and expressive language. So for some of these, you might be working on understanding words for common items. So we'll start with a receptive language, but then we have little vocabulary cards that we can use. Those are included in the unit. Or if you have access to some of the items in the story, that could be a really fun activity to by just working on identifying those words.
14:15
And if we can make it play, and especially if we have real items, that would be really cool. But we can do like hide and seek type of game. Or if we have a playhouse, or even if we're just playing with a table, even if we're just playing with pictures, we can make it super fun. And then if the students are working on basic vocabulary, like body parts, we can put the flower on our head or on our shoulders or under our foot, and that applies to following directions too. And then we can have them point to the different items that we have.
14:51
Or if we're working on responding to questions by pointing, or if we are working on more of those describing goals, we can have different types of flowers, and we can ask them which one is small, which one is yellow, and it's a great way to work on those concepts. And so I feel like I'm throwing a bunch of activities out there, but the possibilities are endless.
15:14
And in the unit, in SLP Now, we have some basic activities and visuals that you can use to make this a little bit easier.
15:22
And like I said, we also have that play based guide. So if you are running, if you feel like you're not having that inspiration, you have lots of quick activities that you can run to, but hopefully that gives you some good ideas. And then that brings us to step five, which is a parallel story.
15:41
And because Lola Plants a Garden was kind of more a sequence of events, of she decided she wanted to plant a garden. She read a book and picked out the seeds, and then she planted them, and then she had to wait a long time. So it was just a sequence of events.
15:57
So the students could just as a way to practice all of the vocabulary and all of the goals that we targeted throughout the unit, the students can pick their own flower to plant and whether they're planting a real seed. That would be super fun, but we don't always have the resources to do that and purchase all of those things.
16:18
So we could pick a couple of pictures of flowers and then make a little book where they choose which flower they want. They have a picture of planting the seed, and then they have a picture of them waiting, and so they can.
16:34
Tell a story with them as the character, and they can bring that home. And if I can use real photos, I think that's super fun. If we act out the story or we can just illustrate it really quickly. There's tons of options there, and the students in the groups kind of, they get really into it, and they share ideas about how they want to do it. So definitely listen to your kiddos and kind of follow their lead if they come up with ideas, but if not, hopefully you have some good inspiration. So that brings us to the end of our unit, and step five can.
17:11
Also take a handful of sessions, and it’s a really great way to integrate all of the skills that we've worked on throughout the entire unit.
17:20
And I hope that you have enough resources here to implement this on your own without having to make any purchases. Just using YouTube, Google images, you have everything that you need. And then I started SLP Now because I was managing a caseload in the triple digits, and I was majorly struggling with my therapy planning. And so I've built out month long units with activities linked, and we've analyzed the books for all of the targets, and everything is in one place. So if you are feeling overwhelmed and you want a little bit of support implementing this, I would love to help you. And we offer a free trial. So if you're wanting to use this unit with your group and you're like, okay, let's see if this actually helps. Head to slpnow.com/unit and you'll get to see a little bit of information about the free trial. But then you can sign up, you can go to therapy plants page, type in Lola Plants a Garden, and then just check out the unit and download some of the resources and give it a try. It's totally free. We won't ask for your credit card or anything like that, but yeah, let me know if you have any questions at all.
18:37
And then again, if you're wanting to see the resources that I've mentioned, head to slpnow.com and we'll see you next week.
18:48
Thanks for listening to the SLP Now podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your SLP friends. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast to get the latest episodes sent directly to you.
19:00
See you next time!
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