Posts Tagged "preschool speech therapy"

If you have kids on your caseload exhibiting the phonological process of “stopping” then one essential trick to have in your “bag of tricks” is something called the “h insertion” or “h aspiration” trick. I first read about it on Dr. Caroline Bowen’s amazing website (www.speech-language-therapy.com) that has a wealth of information and tips for working with children with articulation and phonological disorders.

The trick is to have a child insert a /h/ initial word after the initial fricative sound you are targeting which helps inhibit the production of the stop sound they were producing instead in error. For example, a child who is producing “soap” as “tope” you would have them say “s-hope” which gets a very close approximation of “soap” and frequently prevents them from inserting the “t” in error. I have found this technique particularly helpful which children who can produce the initial fricative correctly after instruction but still insert a stopped sound (i.e. “s-toap” for “soap).

There are free picture lists for using the “h aspiration trick” at www.speech-language-therapy.com. I also include pages with the “h aspiration trick” in my Speech Car Mats for Fronting and Stopping pack which is available on Teachers Pay Teachers.

There are Mats includes to target stopping of initial /s/, /sh/, and /f/ using the “h insertion trick” and the pack also includes mats without the “h insertion trick” for when the child no longer needs that.

The Mats also include a Boom Card(TM) Version now which is awesome because kids can drag the digital car across the screen which I have found really helps them keep the targeted fricative sound “sliding” along instead of stopping the sound.

My other tip for working on stopping is to use gestural and kinesthetic cues. My go-to is a sliding finger down my arm for “s”, a sliding finger along my pursed lips for “sh” and a sliding finger along my lower lip for “f”. This helps the child see that these sounds are “longer sounds” not just a quick tap.

If you want to grab the Speech Therapy Car Mats for Fronting and Stopping they are available either individually or as a big bundle of Speech Therapy Car Mats for Apraxia and Phonology.

Spring is just around the corner so as you start to prep for spring speech therapy I put together a list of awesome FREE spring speech therapy activities to get you going!

First is my Free Spring Sequencing Cut and Glue Pages! This includes activities for 3, 4, and 5 step sequences!

Next up is my Free Spring Prepositions and Spatial Concepts Cut and Glue Book. So fun and interactive!

I also have a Free Spring Categories Activities that are great for preschool and kindergarten speech students working on sorting!

I also have a free Spring Interactive Book Pack called Bunny Needs a Bath! It’s a fun way to practice answering “WH” questions and labeling colors!

Lastly, I have a great free “Bear Wants More” interactive smash mat activity for one of my favorite spring books: “Bear Wants More” by Karma Wilson.

Teaching pronouns to children with autism or language delays can be so tricky! Learning to correctly use “he” and “she” and especially “my” and “your” can take lots of repetitions and practice for our little ones! Here are some of my favorite ideas for teaching pronouns in speech therapy sessions in an interactive and fun way (no flash cards!).

My number one requested game by my students for teaching the pronouns is this Yum Yum Pronouns Interactive Game.

Kids love feeding the kids food and get tons of practice with “he”, “she” and “they”. I don’t mind pulling it out frequently because it’s also great for speech therapy groups with mixed goals. I can target plurals, verbs, sentence structure, expanding utterances, and more with it!

Another activity that is constantly out on my therapy table are Interactive Sentence Flips for targeting pronouns. The one I use most frequently is Pronouns and Verbs Interactive Sentence Flips – People Actions.

These are super effective at teaching pronouns because the child moves an interactive visual cue to make the correct sentence for each picture cue. This helps demonstrate the need to change the pronoun to make a sentence that makes sense for each picture of the people.

I think teaching the pronouns “my” and “your” is the trickiest of all! These are so confusing to our little ones with language delays! One fun way I have worked on my/your is using this Make a Monster Game for Pronouns, Attributes, Following Directions, and Giving Directions.

The Make a Monster pack has pieces for creating different monsters and sentence stems with visual cues for practicing describing the monsters using “My” and “Your”.

I also have a free resource available for practicing “my” and “your”! This Free Interactive Visual for Teaching “My” and “Your” is a simple interactive communication board for describing what clothes either you or your communication partner are wearing using the sentence “My/your _____ is/are (color).” I have found this is a very helpful and concrete way for practicing “my” and “your.”

I am a huge proponent of using music with preschoolers during speech therapy. I run weekly circle time speech groups in my preschool classrooms and I have seen how music can increase engagement and help children with many different speech and language skills. Some of the goals that I work on through music are verbal imitation, gross motor imitation, following directions, prepositions, body parts, vocabulary, and more! Here are my top 10 songs for preschool speech therapy with links whenever possible!

1. Clap Your Hands by Wee Sing: My absolute top pick for getting gross motor imitation and shared attention, also great for working on the concept of fast and slow
2. What are You Wearing? by Hap Palmer: I use this song as my “circle opener” every week to cue my students in that speech circle time is starting. It is a grew song for learning clothing vocabulary and working on gross motor imitation as well as “what” questions.
3. One Little Finger by Super Simple Songs: All the Super Simple Songs music is fantastic for language skills but this particular song is one of my favorites. It is great for learning body parts, following directions, and learning to point. The youtube video is great too and has helped some of my students learn to isolate their pointer finger.
4. Can An Elephant Jump? by ELF Learning: This super fun song is great for lots of goals! Learning action words, yes/no questions, gross motor imitation and more! Kids think it is super funny and I never get sick of it!
5. Octopus by Charlotte Diamond: Cute song is great for gross motor imitation, verbal imitation (kids can’t resist saying Chomp! Chomp! Chomp!), and gestures (I always do a big “Oh no!” with my hands on my cheeks)
6. Animal Boogie by Barefoot Books: This is actually a book with accompanying CD but it’s something I always keep in my circle time bag. It gets requested frequently by my students and it is great for working on action words, gross motor imitation, and commenting (I always ask student’s what animal they liked best while we look at the last page that shows all the animals.
7. We All Go Traveling By by Barefoot Books: Another book with CD by Barefoot Books! This is definitely my most requested book/song by my preschoolers. I love it because I pair a gross motor action with each of the vehicles (stomping for the rumbly truck, etc) and it gets lots of gross motor and verbal imitation from my students. It also grabs the attention of many kids who are tough to engage!
8. The Body Rock by Greg and Steve: There are several good songs on the Kids in Motion CD by Greg and Steve (Freeze Dance is another favorite) but The Body Rock gets the most play with my kids. It is great for learning body parts and getting gross motor imitation.
9. Spider on the Floor by Raffi: Pair this song with some cheap dollar store spiders and you have a winner for teaching body parts and following directions.
10. Puppy, Puppy, Puppy by Kids Express Train: My favorite song on the Imitation Station CD. I have a cheap set of puppies from Oriental Trading Company that I use with this song. It is great for action words, following directions, and getting kids to imitate “woof”!

I hope you find this list helpful for adding in some great songs for working on preschool speech and language skills!

I have always found monitoring progress and writing goals for preschoolers with language delays a tricky proposition. How do I get good baseline data with these squirmy little ones? How do I show progress? How do I pick and prioritize goals in children who may be behind in a wide variety of language areas? After struggling with those questions each year especially at progress report time, I decided to come up with a tool to make screening, progress monitoring, and writing goals for my preschoolers easier! The result of that is the Preschool Language – Screening, Progress Monitoring, and Goal Setting Kit.

The kit is designed to easily gather information about the language skills of preschool age children or older children with language delays. This information is extremely useful in establishing baseline skills, monitoring progress, and determining areas that may need to be targeted for intervention.

Using the screening pages and stimuli pictures, 26 common language skills that are frequently addressed by speech-language pathologists who work with preschool children can be screened.

The screening sheets are very clearly organized and simple to record on. You can also easily pick and choose areas to screen if you only have certain areas of concern. You can see the first page of the screening sheets below.

After you have recorded a child’s performance on the screening sheets, you can quickly transfer that information onto the Screening Summary Form and the Progress Monitoring Form. There is also a preschool language skills goal bank that corresponds to all the language areas screened so you can instantly convert the information you gathered to IEP goals for your preschool students!

Using the screening kit to quickly gather baseline and progress data saves so much time when I am drowning in a large caseload or scrambling to get progress reports done! I am thrilled with how well it has been received by the SLP community and the amazing feedback the kit gets!

On Teachers Pay Teachers the kit has over 550 4.0 star ratings! Here is some of the feedback:

“I can’t believe I’m just now coming across this AMAZING kit! I needed something quick to reassess one of my preschool students and found this! You have saved me so much time. I love that you included IEP goals to go along with it. Thank you so much!”

“This is an awesome product! It is such a life saver and has been so helpful during the crazy busy IEP season. I use it every week! Thank you for putting in so much time and effort and creating such a great product.”

“I can’t say enough good things about this product! The screening has saved me so much time and effort. I work with 40 preschoolers this year and I can pull this out and be ready to screen in a minute’s notice. Love the goals in the kit also.”

To get the Preschool Language – Screening, Monitoring, and Goal Setting Kit click here!