Get ready for the new school year. I brought my crystal ball today, and my crystal ball is when I look at the research. So when we look at the research, we have a better idea of what challenges our preschoolers are going to encounter down the line. And I'm looking today at behavioral challenges that are specifically more likely to occur if the child has a speech and/or language delay.
So I'm gonna cover those five challenges today and what the research says when it comes to these challenges, specifically for children with speech and language delays. I'm also gonna cover the five rules that I focus on as a result. Here you're gonna see these flip cards that I use. You can download these flip cards for free by going to kellyvess.com/behavior.
So that's kellyvess.com/behavior. So when you do that, there's going to be these five rules, these flip cards that I encourage you to use with your children with speech and language impairments. And we also have a couple of extra flip cards. We have here a stop flip card, in case of an emergency, and we have, of course, a thumbs up 'Good choice', flip card that we always like to show.
You can never show this too much, so for some positive encouragement. So these are the five cards, and if you just go to kellyavast.com/behavior, you can download these five cards. I also have for you my certificate, congratulations certificate of completion, which has the five rules explicitly listed. So of course, in thinking of universal design for learning, not only do you have the rule, you have a picture of the rule, you have the re- rule in nice bold Cocoa Puff print, like I like to call it, Cocoa Puff print that really stands out, and you also have gestures.
So you're going to see the gestures if you have, YouTube, if you're watching this on YouTube. If you're listening to it in the podcast, I encourage you to simply use your own gestures. If you don't buy into your ge- gestures, the children won't buy into them either, so create gestures that work for you.
All right. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go through each of the five rules. When I go through each of the five rules, I'm not only gonna tell you what the rule is, what is the gesture when I use this rule, but I'm also gonna share with you what is the specific research that indicates that children with speech and language impairments are more likely to have challenges in this area.
In my school, we have positive behavior supports, which are wonderful. The research supports positive behavior supports. It's a good thing, and these are important principles to keep in mind when you're teaching these five specific rules for children with communication impairments. These rules are more specific to issues that children with speech and language delays are going to have.
So if you think about positive behavior supports, the rules are typically general, nonetheless important, to be kind, to be safe, and to be responsible. Those are great rules that teach you how to be a good student, a good citizen, and I reinforce those. But in addition to that In my speech therapy sessions, every single session, we go over these five rules.
Now, I must admit, because I don't have a lot of time, I always go over the rules at the very end before the children get a treasure from the treasure box. Now, the treasure is an artifact. It's not a reward. It's something that physically shows, yes, you did follow these five rules. Here is a token of that, an artifact that I can physically see.
It's a way of learning that, yes, here is a treasure. I followed the five rules. It's not so much a reward system. It's something that you're using to really give a physical, response. It's a way to demonstrate kinesthetically, yes, you have followed the rules. Now, when it comes to the treasure box, the reason I think it is so important to have a sort of artifact the child picks...
and my treasure box, by the way, is erasers, stickers, pencils. They're things that it's great for children to use for their fine motor for the stickers, or drawing with the pencils, or something like a card that they can read a message on. So it encourages literacy development. But aside from that, the research indicates when they're using positive behavior support systems, if you take out the reward system, such as the pom-pom that the child receives or the marble the child receives when they are engaging in a positive act, then you have less gains than if you didn't have that artifact.
So I do think the treasure box, it's not an external locus of control reward. I don't see it in that manner. I see it as an artifact in which you're giving physical feedback that, yes, I see the behavior you're engaging in. Yes, here is the object that is reflective of that. It's, it's more than just words, right?
It's universal design for learning principles. So moving into that's how I use these five cards. We go through these five cards and the gestures I'm gonna show you today at the end of every single therapy session, and we preface it with, "Did you?" So let's go into the first rule. Now, I just think about my body when it comes to gestures, and I start at the top.
So the very first rule I go through, and it's first on the flip chart, if you go to kellyvest.com/behavior, that's kellyvest.com/behavior, you download these flip cards, and you download this certificate of congratulations for following these five rules as well. That's all free for you. That's my gift to you.
And so I'm actually going to make for every single one of my parents this year a flip card chart for them to use at home. So what I'm gonna say about these flip cards, I like to put this around a little necklace. By the way. I buy a beaded cute necklace that I like to wear every day so that it's always on me, and it doesn't tend to bother me that much 'cause the necklace is a cute beaded necklace.
You can find some really nice ones on Amazon.
The first one is paying attention. So for paying attention, I like to put binoculars over my eyes, and I like to say, "Did you..." And then I'll show them on the card, too, and I'll say, "Pay," and a lot of times the children will say, "Attention," 'cause we're u- doing it so much.
I will do a completion prompt. "Pay," and they'll say, "Attention." And then I say, "Did you?" And then they will do with their fingers a check if they did. They make a check mark if they did. Check. And we make the check mark. I ask them, they self-reflect, and then they'll say, "Check" if they did. So why is paying attention one of the five golden rules that I've selected for children with communication impairments?
It's because the research indicates that children with developmental language disorder are more likely to have difficulty in w- in having sustained attention over time. So this is a challenging area in terms of executive function for children with developmental language disorder. For children with speech sound disorders, there's also been some research from 2014.
It's a little dated, but it has still found that children with speech sound disorders, where it's articulation, not language, but they're more likely to have difficulty with auditory and visual sustained attention task. So both children with language impairment and children with speech sound disorders are at greater risk for having attentional difficulties.
So I wanna be proactive, and I want to explicitly teach them that paying attention is a valuable behavior to learn, and that's something to reflect on, whether they paid attention. We make binoculars with our eyes, so then we go check.
Then I go to the next flip. You download this at kellyvess.com/behavior, you'll have yours as well. The next question is, and I take a telephone to my ear, and I say, "Did you answer every single question?" So why have I chosen that for children with speech and language delays? And that's because for children with language delays, the research indicates that they're at risk for having difficulty answering questions.
And not only is it in an auditory processing sense of the word and not comprehending the questions, but they've also found in the research that answers, questions that they knew the answer to, they were more reluctant to respond to. So pragmatically even, answering questions and realizing that if someone throws a question your way, the social expectation is that you are to answer that question.
Either by saying, "I don't know" if you don't know the answer, or providing an answer if you do. So we want to teach them that social proactive behavior, knowing that children with developmental language disorder are more likely to not answer questions, whether they know the answer or whether they don't.
The second reason why is we be for children with speech sound disorders, we find that these children are more likely to be socially isolated, and they're less likely to be, for fear of ridicule, they're more likely to avoid answering questions within a group. So because of that fear of rid- ridicule, because of that avoidance of talking in a group, they're more likely to not answer a question.
So there's that social pragmatic reason as well, not that they don't know the answer to the question, but fear for the performance of performing their speech within a group setting and fear of ridicule. So we want to teach them that proactive behavior of answering every question and how important that behavior is explicitly early on, realizing that at school age, they're more likely to avoid speaking within a group setting So let's look at the third rule.
So when it comes to answering our question, once again, the gesture I use is I take a telephone to the ear, and the children, they join me, and they too take a telephone to their ear. There, we're using universal design for learning, which is not only that knowledge is represented in a multimodal manner in which you're seeing the print, you're seeing the picture.
We have the gesture here, and then we're gonna say, I ask them, "Did you?" And we say, check, check, check, check, check. But they are also using gestures, using the speeches while talking as well and actively involved in the learning experience. We go to the next picture in the flip book, and that is, did you work super hard?
Now, the reason we care about task persistence, working super hard, is because what we know from the research is that children with developmental language disorders, they're more likely to give up early on. When they have a frustrating or challenging task in front of them that they're going to work super hard instead of get it, giving up. When we look at children with speech sound disorders, what the research has found is that children with speech sound disorders are more likely to become frustrated when they are expressing themselves. Of course, if we just take a step back, we know that children with speech and language impairments are going to have to work harder than their neurotypical peers. If you have a language delay, to express your ideas or to comprehend ideas. If you have a speech sound disorder, to express yourself clearly and articulately, that is going to be more difficult.
Now, following every direction. The research has found is that children with developmental language disorders have difficulty following multiple step directions. Now, this was some recent research that came out of Baghdad, Iraq.
At a clinic of 300 children with speech sound disorders ranging in severity from childhood apraxia of speech to articulation impairment, and everything in between. What they found is that children in this clinic are more likely than the neurotypical population to have less of a willingness in following directions to participate in the speech therapy tasks.
So going to number five. So when we talk about following every directions, the gesture I like to use is I hold up my hand so it's kind of a piece of wood, and we're chopping the wood.
Then we're going to the next one, and that is keeping your hands to yourself. For keeping your hands to yourself, the research indicates that children with both language delays and speech delays are more likely to have self-regulation difficulties.
In terms of the children with language delays, they found that there is weaker executive function skills and that these children are more likely to be physically aggressive. This not only shows in the preschool years, but also in the elementary , particularly boys, are more likely to show physical aggression towards others.
Now, moving back to Baghdad and Iraq, in this study that's going to be in your show notes, of 300 children that had speech sound disorders, the therapists that were working with them there also found behavioral difficulties with the children that had speech sound disorders. They noted that there was physical aggression in terms of hitting, kicking, and scratching was prevalent for the children with speech sound disorders, the 300 children that they worked with in that clinic there that had mild, moderate, or severe speech sound disorders.
So those are the five rules that I wanna emphasize and I wanna be proactive on, knowing that I have my crystal ball- i.e. the research- that is indicating that these are five areas that children with speech and language delays are gonna struggle with behaviorally.
So what we wanna do is we wanna use the positive behavior support method that is so well-researched, and we want to combine that with these five rules that specifically deal with areas that are challenging for children with speech and language delays. So we're going to do that, and not only combine the PBS, the positive behavior support strategies, we're additionally gonna combine the universal design for learning.
To sum it up, when it comes to the positive behavior support strategies, we want the children to have positive experiences 80% of the time. So how do I do that with these rules? What I do is they say, "Catch the child being good," in quotes.
But what I mean is I will just go ahead, show them to pay attention, or make a pay attention gesture, and give them a thumbs up. And then I can tell them, "I can see that you are paying attention. Thumbs up." So I catch them throughout the day, and I'll flip it up here. "Big muscles. You are working super hard."
I'm showing the picture of the specific explicit rule that I see them doing throughout the day, and then I'm giving it to them verbally. They're seeing the print. They're seeing the picture. They're also seeing the gestures. So they're getting all of this positive encouragement.
Now, I say encouragement instead of praise because I'm objectively stating the behavior that I'm observing, and I'm giving them that feedback that I'm seeing this, and I'm acting out the gesture, like I said, using the words, showing the print, and showing the picture. So that's really where your emphasis wants to be, not on redirecting, redirecting, redirecting.
We don't wanna be redirecting the child 80% of the day. We want to be giving them positive input throughout the day using these rules. So what I often see people do when they get these rule cards is they use them as redirection cards, in which they're constantly bombarding the child and redirecting the child and showing them what they should not be doing and correcting them all day.
No one wants to be corrected every step you take, you can't do anything right. We don't wanna do that. These cards are positive. This is to give positive encouragement of these five positive behaviors. We proactively want to explicitly make clear that these are positive behaviors that we want to see, and we want to, reinforce these positive behaviors by reviewing them and giving an artifact.
Within the therapy sessions, at the very end of the therapy session, we go through each of these five rules. And then after that, they pick a treasure. Now, sometimes the child might not pick a treasure. The child may not have followed every single direction. "Okay, let's come and sit down," and the child might have gone the other way looking at me the whole time.
And we go through that and we say, "Did you follow every direction?" And they didn't, so it's like, "You know what? We didn't get a treasure today, but next week we're gonna remember to follow every single direction and you're going to get a treasure then. That's okay. We all make mistakes. We just made a mistake and forgot this week that we need to follow every direction."
You don't make a big deal up out of it. You do make sure that 80% of the time the child is successful. 80% of the time or more, they're getting a treasure. You don't want the child to be in a hole that they can't get out of. But that is how I use it at, in therapy when I'm working with pairs, if I'm working with a group of three, if I'm working with a single child.
In the large group setting, we go through the rules to start the day and also to end the day, like in the positive behavior support strategies. Did we do this as a group?" And we go through all the rules and we do check. I like to hit the ground and drum the ground with them when we do our check, 'cause that's really fun. It makes a nice drum beat circle. And then after a round that, I will go around with bubbles for each of them, and they'll fall on their head.
Or I might take a little bit of glitter and I put it on my finger, and I'll ask them, "Do you want it on your head or do you want it on your foot?" And then I'll put a little sparkle on their foot, which I call magic dust or superstar dust, which they get for following all the rules.
It's a really quick artifact. Once again, I don't want you to think of it as a reward in which someone else is in charge of the child's behavior. You're stating objectively what they did, and they're getting, a little artifact that, that demonstrates that they did follow these five rules.
It makes it more concrete for them. And as I said before, they have done the research on positive behavior support systems. If you take away that artifact or if you have that artifact, and having that artifact produces better outcomes. So I always like to have the numbers and the research to support it, besides the theory, the experience, and the individual child.
I want you to do what you do best. Go to www.kellyvess.com/behavior and take that and download. You're gonna love it. This is a beautiful certificate. These are beautiful flip cards, and wear it around your neck, and put it on a cute necklace that you enjoy wearing all year. You're looking ahead proactively at challenges that lie ahead, and what you're going to do is you're going to explicitly teach them the rules of the game so that they can be successful students, so that they can be successful communicators pragmatically.
So give them a leg up. And with that, roll up your sleeves and make the world a better place, one child at a time. And one final note, if you have not completed the AAC survey, do so soon. I need to hear your input. I believe we have to date 190 complete surveys
now, if you're not a speech pathologist, I really wanna hear you, from you. If you are a paraprofessional, if you are a special educator, if you are a parent, if you're someone who works with one child who uses a tablet such as an ipad that has an AAC device on it, I wanna hear your opinion. Whether you're a caregiver, whether you're an occupational therapist, physical therapist, teacher, paraprofessional, ABA tutor, BCBA, I really want to get your input.
This fall I will be presenting at ASHA, I'll also be doing a policy presentation at the Division for Autism and Developmental Disabilities for the Council for Exceptional Children.
Teachers, paraprofessionals, parents, we need to hear your voice. From all over the United States, you are experiencing the same issues on your back porch.
Your voice needs to be heard. The more voices, the better. 200 is great. It would be even better if we could get 400 I also thank you for completing the survey.
As far as the survey is concerned, we have an 87% completion rate. That is excellent, especially considering that the survey is comprehensive. It's 15 to 20 minutes long. Now, you are gonna receive a wonderful, if I do say so myself, AAC toolkit with, in Spanish, Arabic, English, where, the ready-to-share, ready-to-use materials to make AAC implementation absolutely easier for you.
You're gonna have a goal bank. You're gonna have a video training to share with parents. You are going to also have a handout to share with parents about high-tech AAC. This is a nice kit that makes your job easier, and it's in Spanish, Arabic, and English. So I'm here to help you as much as I can.
I know I'm asking a lot out of you to complete a 15 to 20 minute survey. The survey is that long for a reason, because if you know intervention, the details matter. They don't matter a little, they matter a lot. So I want you to press on that link, have your voice heard.
The data is showing that there are great areas of need that call or demand for policy changes today when it comes to high-tech AAC. The more voices, the louder the call. Please make sure to complete that so we can be agents of change. Together we are better. Thank you so much. I'll see you next week
