#184: A Month of Therapy Using a Picture Book

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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. I am recording a series of episodes where I share month long therapy units for your entire school age caseload from preschool through high school. And last week we talked about the early language unit, which is perfect for those preschool kindergarten students. And this week we're diving into a picture book unit, which is great for that k through two range. And I'm really excited to dive in. And if you're listening to these episodes and you're wondering which units are ideal for your caseload, we have the perfect resource for you.

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We have a two minute quiz that once you take that, we will send you a list of recommended units for your caseload so you don't have to keep wondering. And it'll be a nice little email with all of the resources all bundled together. And you can find the link to that quiz in the show notes@slpnow.com. And the show notes will also include any other links that I share during this episode today. So again, you can find that@slpnow.com 184 now, throughout this unit, we are going touch on a handful of goals. So we'll talk about articulation, basic concepts, grammar, syntax, vocabulary, phonological awareness, comprehension. So we'll focus primarily on those goals. But you can use this unit to target any goal, literally any goal that you are working on with your students.

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All of the activities in this unit are language rich and they are the perfect context for therapy. So now let's dive into the actual unit. So we are going to be reading the book. Spring is here. It's a super cute story about a mole and a bear. The mole wakes up because he's done hibernating and spring is here, but the bear is still asleep and the mole really wants his friend to wake up and he does a bunch of problem solving to get the bear to wake up. So that's the story. Now let's dive into the steps of the unit. So step one, and just to take a step back first, I like to structure my units using Doctor Ukraine, it's literacy based therapy framework.

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If you're not familiar with that or you need a refresher, head to the show notes and I'll link some resources there to get you up to speed. But I will do my best to explain all of the steps as we go through. So hopefully you can still follow. There will be additional resources@slpnow.com 184 okay, so that brings us to step one. Prestory knowledge activation. There are four different things that I like to do in this step of the unit, and I always get questions about the timing of all of, like, how long does this unit actually take? How much time do you spend in each step? And the answer is, it really depends on the group.

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But I find that with a school age caseload where I'm working with groups, I tend to spend about a month on a unit, and this tends to match up. So if I see students once a week for 30 minutes, it ends up taking about a month. If I see students a couple times a week for those 30 minutes sessions or whatever the length is, it also ends up taking about a month, because with how I do my scheduling, the students who are being seen more frequently have more needs. And so we just need more time to get through the unit. So that's how long the entire unit ends up taking. And then we'll talk about how much time we would spend on each of the steps as we go through them.

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But for step one, this really depends on the student's level of background knowledge walking into the unit. So sometimes it might just take a session or a little bit less than a session, but other times we might have to spend a couple sessions filling in that background knowledge. So there we go. In terms of what we would actually do, the first thing that I like to do is a book walk. So if I have the actual book, I'll show them a cover, maybe look at a couple pages and just kind of observe what they're able to tell me about what they see.


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And if they are able to put together beautiful sentences and describe all the things, and they demonstrate a lot of knowledge about hibernation and spring and all the season changes, then I might skip some of the activities that I'm going to tell you about. But if they struggle with this activity, which more often than not is what happens, then I will use a KWL chart to help kind of take an inventory of what we actually do know and what we want to learn about the topic. So a KWL chart is just basically a piece of paper split into three segments. And then the first column, we write what we know about the topic. In the second column, we write what we want to know, and then in the third column, we write what we learned.


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And so I usually try to match that up with what we want to learn. But again, this is a language rich activity, so it's not just a fluff activity. It is the perfect context for working on our students goals. Whether they are working on vocabulary or answering questions or using grammatical structures, as we're discussing and writing questions, answering questions, we're able to target all of those goals in a really beautiful and meaningful way. And then another activity that we can use is a virtual field trip. So we're able to fill in a lot of the KWL chart as we're doing the virtual field trip. So for spring is here, and I would choose a virtual field trip based on the needs of my group. But one field trip that I came across that I really liked was about it kind of explains the seasons.


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And that time concept is a little bit tricky for some kiddos. So I think that's a really great activity to embed here. But then the video continues to dive into spring, what we see in spring. It talks a little bit about hibernation, and so it helps illustrate some of those vocabulary concepts, and it also helps us understand, okay, like why is the bear sleeping? And why do things look the way that they do? It's just, I really like that video to target a lot of the common concepts that my students struggle with when we're reading this book. Then the fourth activity that I like to do, I will almost always do a book walk, and I will almost always pre fill the graphic organizer.


07:17
And then the KWL chart and the virtual field trip are maybe kind of dependent on the needs of the group. So the fourth thing that I like to do, again, is that graphic organizer. So I will print off or I will pull up a digital version of my story grammar organizer. And based on what we discussed, I will have students infer the characters in the story, the problem in the story, and all of those story grammar elements. This is a really great activity for a number of reasons, because, one, it gives them exposure to the story grammar elements. It is a great way to tie in all of the pre story knowledge learning that we did across the three previous activities. And it's just, again, a great language activity. We are creating sentences, we're embedding vocabulary concepts, all of that good stuff.


08:11
So that is step one. And the four activities that I like to use here are book walk, KJBL chart, virtual field trip, and then pre fill that story grammar organizer. And then that brings us to step two, which is to read the book. And the book can be read in just a few minutes. Like, I found a YouTube video, and the video is three minutes long. And that is a tip. If you are not able to purchase the actual book or your library doesn't have it in stock or whatever the case might be, you can access the book on YouTube. I do have a little trick to access YouTube without ads, so I will add that to the show notes as well. So that brings us to step three, post story comprehension.


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So after we finish reading the book, whether or not the students have specific goals for literal and or inferential questions, for the literal questions, I have little question cards that have questions and then visual answer choices. And so I may or may not use the answer choices if it's not necessary for the students. But I find that's a really nice way to scaffold this. So we'll run through the questions, and again, it's a language rich activity. It is not just a comprehension activity because I ask the questions and then the students respond. So we can use this to target vocabulary, grammar, all of the things. And then the second thing that I like to do, well, I guess literal questions is one, inferential questions is another.


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The units in SLP now include lists of inferential questions, but where slps, we can come up with list of questions too. Then the third thing is story grammar. So I've created story grammar organizers that include pre little icons for spring is here, and for every book that we have in our library, it has a little icon for the characters and the setting and all of that. And then that can be a way to scaffold this activity. And it's a great comprehension activity because who was in the story? That's a question. When did it happen? Where did it happen? What was the problem? Those are all wh questions, and it's just a really nice, meaningful activity to work on comprehension.


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And then we can shape that into if the students are working on narratives, then we can continue to target that in step four, which is focus skill activities or skill practice. So in the last video, I spent a lot of time talking about activities for step four, and I feel like there are even more skills and activity ideas for spring is here because the early language book was a lot more play based, but here we go. I'm going to try and keep this as succinct as possible while still giving you really nice, concrete examples. And I keep mentioning SLP now, and you can absolutely implement this on your own if you go to the show notes. I have linked a bunch of the resources that I've mentioned throughout this episode, and I really hope that you have what you need to implement.


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And if you want a little bit more support inside SLP now, we have the unit plan that lists all of these activities with related resources. And for step four, we also have a tab under, like, there's a page for the unit that lists all of the targets. And for each target, we have linked activities to help you teach those skills and do some really structured practice with them. And then you have access to all of the different materials in one spot without having to do any prep. So I think that is a huge time saver. I needed this when I was managing my caseload in the triple digits. And if you are wanting some support and you're like, okay, I don't want to put this together myself, just give me the resources. You can try it completely free, like no credit card required.


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And we have this unit plus 400 more. So if you had to slp now.com unit, you can find information about the free trial and sign up. Go to therapy plans tab. Type in spring is here. And then you'll have access to all of the activities. But I'll walk you through some now, and I'll just pick a handful of them. Okay, so one of the goals that I mentioned was articulation. So I prefer to target articulation separately, but sometimes we just have those mixed groups. And it is what it is. We have gone through all of the books and identified the highest frequency words and articulation targets. And then we have made book specific articulation activities.


13:07
And so for each of our books, you can go through and you can find, like, for spring is here, we have an articulation activity pack, and it includes a bunch of different targets. This one had, like, a lot of s blends and vocalic r and sh. And so we have book specific lists and articulation cards. So it is a language retractivity still, even though it's articulation. And so we can use those cards for our articulation kiddos. But if someone else is working on describing, we can describe the pictures. If someone is working on syntax or grammar, we can work on creating sentences using those cards. These opportunities are endless. And then let's say we're working on some basic concepts. So we've identified the basic concepts in the book as well. And there, this is based on a research article.


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Like, we structured these activities based on how the research told us to or what the research indicated. And we have some direct instruction activities, like, for example, open and close is one of the common concepts in the book. And then we have a slide deck that you can use to teach that basic concept in a very structured and evidence backed way. So that can be some of your very structured teaching, but you can still, again, you know what I'm going to say, it's a language rich activity, and as we're going through that, our students can work on, like creating sentences and describing the vocabulary and all of those things. So just because it says it's a basic concept activity doesn't mean we can't use it to target a number of goals.


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We also have a printable sentence pack with icons, but we also have digital ones. If you don't have the time to prep and print. So you can, in the unit plan, you can literally just click to open up the sentence pack, and then you can use that. There's little icons that students can use to build sentences. This is really helpful if students are, because I like to model and recast the grammar targets and the vocabulary too. But if students aren't picking that up, I find that they really benefit from a visual activity to practice that skill. So, like with students who I've modeled and recasted irregular past tense verbs a million times, but they continue to produce errors with that, I find that having those icons makes a world of a difference. So that's an example of how you can do that.


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And again, it's language rich. We can target a bunch of goals using that. Then we have describing activities which you can use for categories, object functions, synonyms, antonyms, as well as grammar, all of those things. We also have a smart deck which includes more drill based practice for describing categories, plural nouns, past tense verbs, and phonological awareness. If you're trying to sprinkle that into your sessions. So lots and lots of options there, and we can spend a huge chunk of the unit in step four. And then the last step five, is to create a parallel story. So I grab a fresh story grammar organizer, and I'll pull up our initial story grammar organizer. If the students are like, oh, like, I wish the story was more like the one that we made in step one versus the actual story, then we can do that.


16:38
But I grabbed the story grammar organizers that we made in the previous steps, and then we grab a fresh one. And then I ask the students, I explained that they get to make their own story, and we get to choose how we structure it, and we're just going to take this story as inspiration. So they then get to fill in the story grammar organizer with their own story. Maybe there was a time that they couldn't wake up, or maybe they have a favorite story from the springtime, or maybe they did something really fun at school that's related to the spring, or maybe they want to pick another hibernating animal.


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Whatever they're interested in, they get to make the story and then just use the previous organizers as so the first thing they need to do is fill out that organizer and then we practice retelling the story so they can record themselves telling the story or we can act it out. And they eventually have to be able to act it out independently, without my help or without referencing the organizer. But it ends up being a really simple story. But we go through the steps of outlining it, practicing the retell, and once they get really good at that, then we publish it. And we can do this by just like grabbing a stack of paper and stapling it together and making a little book. We can make a digital book on using like PowerPoint or Google Slides, whatever makes the most sense.


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Sometimes we will just record us acting out the story and the students will take turns narrating it, or each student will narrate their own story. You can decide what combination of these makes the most sense for your group, but yeah, that brings us to the end of the unit. So again, if you want to access any of the resources that I shared during this episode, head to slpnow.com 184 and I can't wait to see you next week where we'll dive into a fiction article. 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. See you next time.