I have always
been the type of person who loves structure and routine. Shortly after starting my job as a school
speech and language pathologist, I realized this profession doesn't have a
whole lot of that! Students of varying
skill levels, cognitive levels, and personalities come waltzing into your room
and you quickly have to give a lesson that will meet all of their
needs/goals….and in 30 minutes! An
overwhelming task for sure! It was my
goal to figure out how to to structure my school year (create a "curriculum") in a way that made
planning easier for me, met all of my students’ goals, and could help them
practice their skills in functional contexts.
I didn't like just flying by the seat of my pants and definitely didn't believe that playing a game every single session was going to help my kids
utilize their skills in the general education classroom. Drilling isolated language skills such as
phonology, semantics, pragmatics, and syntax/morphology then expecting kids to
go into other environments and use those skills is just not realistic all the
time. I learned, through the Story
Grammar Marker program, we need not forget about the Discourse level which
bridges the gap between language and literacy.
At this discourse level, we can help kids utilize their language skills
in functional contexts and hopefully allow for greater carryover into other
environments. Not all kids are ready for
the discourse level right off the bat.
Students who are very low cognitively may have to do that drilling of
isolated skills for a great length of time before moving to the discourse
level, if ever.
After
purchasing the Story Grammar Marker program last year (realizing many of my
kids needed to be working on narrative skills) and religiously reading the Mind
Wing Concepts blog; I realized that I could structure my school year around
their concepts/programs which are also aligned with the Common Core
Standards! This is the blog post that
gave me my idea:
Since the
elementary school I work at does trimester grading periods, it was easy to
divide my year into the three levels of discourse (I call them “units” with my
kids) that the blog post talks about (conversation, narration,
exposition). I figured by doing this I
could keep all of my language groups on the same page and actually feel a sense
of direction!
Now, this is
my first year trying this sort of set up, so I definitely expect many bumps in
the road as I go. This will be a great
learning experience for me! I created
this blog so anyone else who loves structure as much as I do can follow my
little experiment and decide if maybe this is something they would like to do
at some point! In addition to just
keeping you updated on my curriculum, I also plan to post therapy documents I
have created/used, activity ideas, classroom decorating ideas, and anything
else I want to share! I hope you find
something in this blog that is useful to you!
