#185: A Month of Therapy Using a Fiction Article

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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. This week we are diving into another month long therapy unit. We are doing a series of six episodes where we break down month long units for your entire school age caseload from preschool through 12th grade. And this week we are diving into a fiction article. This unit is ideal for older students who still benefit from narrative support, and there is tons of research supporting targeting narratives even through high school. There's been some really cool studies, and I will share a couple of resources in the show notes so you can learn a little bit more.


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And then if you're not quite sure which unit type is ideal for your caseload as you're listening to these episodes, check out the show notes and those are@slpnow.com 185 again slpnow.com 185 and you will find a link to a two minute quiz that once you take that we will send you a recommended list of units for your specific caseload. And like I said, there will be resources about targeting narratives and tons of other resources as I mentioned them throughout this episode. So hopefully that is super helpful. And now we get to dive into the actual unit. We are going to be reading Miss Johnson's plant experiment. It is a fiction article that is available for free on read works and I will share the link to that resource in the show notes as well.


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And again, they are@slpnow.com 185 and it is an article about some students who conduct a plant experiment. And we'll walk through the five steps of the literacy based therapy framework. Doctor Ukraine it's framework and I will share different activity ideas for each of the five steps. And the cool thing about this framework is that you can target any goal, literally any goal, using this text. And the cool thing about this is that it's very contextualized practice and it's very meaningful for students and that can really facilitate generalization and all the things I could talk about literacy based therapy for hours and hours. So in the show notes, I'll just share some quick resources that will be helpful. Anyway, let's dive into step one, which is pre story knowledge activation.


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There are four things that I like to do, like a menu of options that I generally choose from. And this list is not comprehensive, but they're just some of my favorites. So the first step is to do an article walk where we'll pull up the article. They typically have a little photo at the top and then the title, and then we might skim a couple of the paragraphs. And then I will just ask the students what they know about the topic and kind of ask a couple questions and see how much background knowledge they have. If they really struggle with the article walk, then I will take a step back. And I really like to use a KWL chart.


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So this is where you split a piece of paper into like, you draw three columns on a piece of paper, and the k stands for what they know, w stands for what they want to learn, and l stands for what they learned. So as we're going through, we can kind of fill in the k column about what they already know. So what do they know about plants? What do they know about plant experiments? What do they want to know about plants and plant experiments? And then as we go through the next steps, we can fill in the l column about what they learned. And this is a great way to build that background knowledge, which will be critical as we dive into the different language skills as we go through.


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It'll help with their grammar, it'll help with being able to make inferences, all of that good stuff. So that's what we've got for the KWL chart. So one thing that we might do to help fill in that chart is to do a virtual field trip. I will include an example of a virtual field trip that you might use for this unit in the show notes. But I like to pick out a virtual field trip based on my students needs and just to take a quick step back. A virtual field trip is typically just a YouTube video. There are some other resources that you can use for those quote unquote virtual field trips, but it's just a video that gives students a little bit more background knowledge.


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You could also pull like research articles or not research articles, but you could pull non fiction picture books. Or you can do a Google search and find some educational resources there as well. But I really like the YouTube video because it helps they get to experience it a little bit more than they might just by looking at some pictures. So I really enjoy those. And then the last activity that I like to do is to have students pre fill story grammar organizer. So after doing those different activities, I will have them guess what is going to happen in the article. So they'll fill in like who the characters are, what the setting is, what they think the problem will be, and it's really an inferencing activity.


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But after doing that article walk using the KWL chart, filling them with a virtual field trip, they'll have some really good context to help them with that activity. And I like this because it gives them increased exposure to the story grammar elements and it helps give them a little bit of a framework before we dive in. And especially with older students, we'll keep this first story grammar organizer and compare it to the actual story grammar organizer for the actual story, like what actually happens. And there's some really nice compare and contrast. This is great for some different syntax activities. Oh my goodness, so many good things. That is step one. So just to recap, we do an article walk, a KWL chart, the virtual field trip, and then we pre fill the story grammar organizer and use your clinical judgment.


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You don't have to do all these activities. And you may need to do multiple virtual field trips depending on the student's needs. And remember, all of these activities are language rich, so we can target any goal throughout all of these activities. And sometimes that might just look like modeling and recasting the grammar and vocabulary targets, but other times they're responding to questions, they're using vocabulary words. There's so many opportunities to embed practice for those skills. So that is step one. And if you're curious about kind of more of the nitty gritty details of how each session is structured and how do you know which tips like, especially if you have a mixed group with a bunch of students and a bunch of goals, how do you know what to target?


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I will share some resources in the show notes as well on how I structure a session and how I decide what to focus on and kind of how I organize that. Like if you have a group of three students and they all have four different goals, how in the world would you target those twelve goals in the context? I get that would be overwhelming. So check out the show notes for the link to some session structure resources to help you with that. And now we get to dive into step two, which is reading. That's the easiest step in the whole framework. You would just pull up the article and then read through it. And at this level, students may be able to read these independently.


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Maybe you want to do popcorn reading where each student reads a paragraph, or maybe it just makes sense for you to read the whole paragraph or the whole article. You can decide what makes the most sense and what is most engaging for your group. And in this step, you just read through the article. This is by far the shortest step in the whole unit. It will likely take you about five minutes. You don't want to add a bunch of extra stuff here. Just focus on reading the article and just making sure that students are engaged during the reading, but you don't need to add anything else. So then that brings us to step three, which is post story comprehension. And there are three main areas that I will focus on for step three. The first one is literal questions.


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And again, I'm going to emphasize this again, every activity that I list is language rich and you can use it to target any goal. So yes, we may have students in our group who have a goal to work on answering WH questions about a story, but we may not. But this is still a helpful activity because we can use it to when they're responding to these questions, we are able to target those grammar, vocabulary, articulation, any of those types of goals we can still use. So literal questions are just basic questions about the story. Then we can also ask inferential questions. I really like this activity for this age group too, because we did do that prior knowledge and so that'll give them, they're able to reference the text and use the prior knowledge that they've built to successfully answer these types of questions.


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So I love this combination in the structure of the unit. I think it works out really well. Another idea for a comprehension activity is story grammar. So you can pull out that story grammar organizer and just run through the elements and ask wh questions. Who was the story about? When did the story happen? Where did it happen? What was the problem? Run through those questions and I often revisit the story grammar story retell in step four and step five of the unit. So this is a great kind of bridge activity to lead them to that. And again, we can target all of our students goals throughout this activity as well. Then that brings us to step four, which is the structured skill practice. And there are an unlimited number of activities that we could use in this step.


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We can spend several sessions diving into all of the student skills. So I am just going to share a couple ideas. And then one cool thing about the SLP now membership is that we have a bunch of activities linked. We have a page for every therapy plan. We have over 400 therapy plans. We've been working really hard. And then we have a unit plan page that lists activities. So it will list all of the different things you could do for step one, step two, step three, step four. And then we also have activities linked. And there's a mix of just click and go like Google Slides types of materials, some of them are PDF's, some of them are interactive materials. There are lots and lots of options for you to have easy access to those activities.


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But for the skill section, we've analyzed all of the books and identified all of the targets. So like all the articulation words, all of the prefixes, suffixes, all the grammar structures, all the syntax stuff. And we're constantly building this out and adding more resources to save you tons of time, because implementing literacy based therapy really isn't very difficult. But it can make a world of a difference to have easy access to all of the activities to target your student specific goals. It just makes it so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time, and it cuts down your planning time significantly. So you can absolutely implement this on your own.


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But if you are looking for a little bit of support, head to slpnow.com unit and you can sign up for a totally free trial, no credit card required, and you can go to therapy plans tab. Type in Miss Johnson's plan experiment, and then you will have access to the unit plan, all the targets, all of the materials, and you'll have everything that you need to implement this right away without any prep. So like I said, we'll dive into a couple activity ideas, but know that there are way more ideas and resources waiting for you. Some ideas are working on cause and effect questions, so this can a lot of our students might have goals around this, and so there are some pre written cause and effect questions. I'm sure you could generate your own cause and effect questions.


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We also have some compare and contrast activities, so we in terms of vocabulary. So we've selected some vocabulary from the article and created some compare and contrast activities. And then you can also compare and contrast your story grammar organizers from step one and step three. So that's a great activity. We've also identified some fact and opinion statements from the article, and that can be a really fun activity for students working on those types of goals. But again, it's also a very language rich activity, so you can still pull this activity and target your students other goals as well. We've identified tier two vocabulary words and have multiple meaning word activities and evidence backed vocabulary activities to help you work through those. We've identified the prefixes and suffixes and have really cool activities to help you target those.


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We're working on adding syntax activities for all of them. So if you need support with embedded clauses and all of that good stuff, you'll have some ready to go resources for that as well. And then I don't always love when I have to target articulation in a mixed group. I really prefer to target articulation separately, using like, a speedy speech model or something like that. But we know that's not always possible. And so we have articulation activities, like little articulation bundles that are specific for every article and book. And so you can, if you go to Miss Johnson's plant experiment, you can find the articulation bundle there, and it has article specific targets.


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And again, you can use these articulation targets for your students working on those articulation goals, but you can also use them for grammar and vocabulary targets or whatever other goals you're working on. And then that brings us to step five, which is creating a parallel story. So throughout the unit, we've been revisiting the story grammar organizer, and in step three, we kind of started filling it out. And then in step four is when we would have continued to practice that. And then in step five, we would revisit the story grammar organizer for the article, and then we would work as a group to create our own story. So the first thing I would do is have them fill in the graphic organizer for their new story, and they get to choose what the story is about.


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If throughout the unit, a lot of stuff will come up. And so maybe they did a plant experiment in their class, or maybe they want to do a plant experiment, and they can make up a story about what that would be like. So there's lots of options there. And then once we fill in the organizer with their version of the story, then everyone in the group will practice retelling the story, even if they don't have a narrative goal. This is a really great opportunity to embed all of their vocabulary and just all of the goals that we've been working on throughout the entire unit. Everyone works on retelling the story until they hit mastery, and then we publish it. And publishing the story can include acting it out and maybe recording a little video.


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And then students can take turns narrating that final story, or we can grab a stack of paper and kind of bind it and have them illustrate it, or we can do a digital version using like, Google Slides or anything like that. I did a whole podcast episode just on parallel stories, so I will share that in the show notes as well. So that wraps up the ideas for our fiction article again. Head to SLP now.com 185 to check out all of the resources that I mentioned, and we'll see you next week. 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.