We are all miracles. And must make the most of our limited time here. Each of us have these unique gifts to contribute to the world and it's our job to develop these gifts and give them away. That's why I created the preschool SLP podcast, the preschool S so P is about working smarter to create real change in ourselves and in.
Being an SLP is a mission.
Let's discuss topics that matter. What are the game changing strategies? How can we treat the whole child?
How can we create the shiniest versions of ourselves and of our clients? We're here at the drawn board for a reason, you bring your own unique gifts together. Let's create.
She's a fire she's following.
I am so excited for today's episode because I'm gonna take you behind the scenes and show you how to be one and done so that you can be 100% present with the kiddos you work with. I'm gonna show you what I do every Friday so that the next week I have my activities set up, and I can simply do little adaptations for the diverse caseload that I work with.
I work with children ages two to six years of age, but what I'm gonna show you today has been adapted effectively for my SIS members that work in early intervention and for my SIS members that work all the way through elementary school, and even some work in the middle school level and adapt the materials in that manner.
So I want you to be open-minded and don't think, "Is this gonna work for my kiddos?" Ask, "How is this gonna work for my kiddos?" You're gonna come away from this episode with some great ideas on how you too can be 100% present when it comes to your students. So first I'm gonna take you into the past and what not to do, which I did early on in my career.
Now, what I would do before is I would look at my diverse caseload of 50 preschoolers, and I would say, "Okay, I need to do different activities for different children." So if the child had a language delay, I would do this type of activity. If the child had pragmatics they need to work on, I'd work on this type of activity.
If they had stuttering, they would do this activity. If they had articulation, they would do this activity. So i'd have 10 different activities set up, and I would be reaching behind me like a fast food restaurant clerk pulling stuff off the shelf behind me. It was all ready to go 'cause I'm seeing the kiddos back to back, but it was really not top-shelf intervention.
For one thing, I was too busy looking at what am I gonna be doing next and considering what's next on this thing, to even be present. So I couldn't enjoy the child. I couldn't be in the moment. I couldn't be as responsive as I'd like to be because I'm worried about the activity that I'm doing on hand, and I felt like an octopus.
I'm pulling activities in a million different directions. I have things down at my feet. I have things behind me. It was crazy. It was not working well for the child or for myself, and I would come home at the end of the day and I felt like I was doing factory work all day. I was exhausted. I was physically exhausted.
I had nothing left in the tank. I was too busy chasing my tail trying to keep up and doing all of these different activities that I'm pulling literally off me behind the shelf, off the shelf behind me. So I don't want that for you. There is a better way, and that's what I'm gonna show you today. Now, what I do today is I apply the universal design for learning principles.
That means I develop activities that are multimodal, multisensory, highly engaging in nature, that are using print, that are using objects, that are using gestures. That is all in there. The children are learning the concept in this hands-on manner, but they're also expressing themselves in a hands-on manner using task-oriented movement activities, using songs, using print.
So I develop highly effective activities, highly engaging activities. I develop two every single week for my kiddos, and I'm gonna use those activities for every single child on that caseload, and I'm gonna show you how I do that in just a moment. But before I dive into that, I'm gonna share with you the materials that I use.
I'm just gonna show you if you wanna go shopping for the school year, that's always the most fun part. I'm gonna show you this is what I buy from Amazon. Of course, I prefer you to support your local business in your community, but I'm just gonna give you the Amazon links.
I'm just gonna share with you what I'm doing on my back porch, and these are materials that I like. So first things first. On Fridays, the week before I'm actually going to do therapy, and the weeken- the reason I say the week before is because you need your weekends for recovery.
This is a very hard job that you're doing if you're working with children with special needs. It takes a lot out of you emotionally, physically, cognitively. This is hard work. This is why I take self-care so seriously. I feel like we're like Olympic athletes. There is a lot expected out of you, and that's why the burnout rate is so high for children with special needs.
I don't want you anywhere near burnout. I want you to be performing at an optimal level. For you to be performing at an optimal level, you need to take optimal care of yourself. So what I do on Fridays, this is what I'm gonna show you, so I can enjoy the weekend, so I recover over the weekend, so I can think creatively and innovate over the weekend, so I can grow over the weekend.
I need space for that. What I do on Fridays is I prepare my two weekly activities. Now, to prepare my activities, I am a SIS member myself. The activities that I distribute every week are the activities I use in therapy with my kiddos, and I think that's really great because I get first-hand experience of what I want to tweak and do differently when I use them Is in the materials I develop, I, first of all, I print these out.
But every- I have two movement-based activities that are literacy based, that involve singing, that are really fun. So this week I have Pete's the Cat Pizza Party. The Perfect Pizza Party. Now, you d- never need the book because that's in the Google Slide stacks, so I'll explain with that in a minute.
And I also am using a really fun sequencing activity on making cupcakes, and that's from the book Crack, Whisk, Bake: To Make Cupcakes. Now, I don't have either of these books. That's okay. I have a really fun YouTube link, Google Slides deck at the end of, that I picked out at the end of the Google Slides deck that I can reference.
So I have everything I need. I really don't need the book. If you have the book, that's nice, but you don't need the book. So both of these are fun books with a lot of movement involved, with a lot of singing involved, with the print pictures involved. They're really fun. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and print out these two activities, and here I'm using last week's activities from my SIS membership to show you.
I print them at home and I color with using my color printer. You could, of course, print them at your workplace. And then I use this Scotch laminator, okay? This is, like, $30 from Amazon. It's really easy to use. The reason I use this laminator is because if you're like me and you work in a school setting, the laminator isn't working half the time.
So I do this all at home. I have my Scotch laminator and I print out the two movement activities, and then I laminate them. Then I use these Velcro coins.
Now, these are the Velcro coins that I use from... I get these from Amazon. They sell them for like, $10. It looks like they're half-inch Velcro coins. That's perfect for me, 'cause if they're too small it makes the fine motor too difficult.
If they're too big, you're wasting Velcro. You don't need that much. This will be in the show notes, the links are, so you can get the same ones that I use in the And then I stick these on the stickers. So these are the stickers, I call them. I make them after laminating them.
I stick hard Velcro on the back of each of the pictures. Now, the reason I use hard is 'cause I use soft felt boards, and the teachers can use these on their felt boards, and they can stick them on. So I put hard on the stickers and soft on the backing. Another thing I do is I'll go ahead and I'll stick three hard coins on the back of my, what I call signs, so I can easily put them on a felt board.
Or in my workplace, I have a big soft Velcro on my cylinder blocks, can easily post them up there. Or if I'm doing home visits, I can put them on my traveling felt board and just stick them on out there. So I just stick a couple stickers on the back here because if you're like me, you don't have a break between when you're pushing, when you're doing service delivery model in the classroom to when you're doing your, in the therapy to when you're doing home visits.
You need to be just be able to pull it off, stick it on. It has to be that simple And so what I do is I cut out all the pictures, and then I laminate them, and then I stick the hard Velcro on the stickers and the soft Velcro on the back. Okay? So I do that with two activities every week, and I'm showing you the activities from last week, if you see this on YouTube, as an example.
The fun books I'm using is from Pete, the Fun Pizza Party. I made up an activity. And the Crack, Whisk, Bake to Make Cupcakes book. That's another really fun one, especially for narrative development. This one, the theme this week was final consonant deletion, so I wanted to use cooking activities because ingredients have a lot of plurals in them, and I wanted them to practice that plural S and the Z sound.
I went for that ending of sounds. In addition to that, I use these sleeves here, which is also gonna be in your show notes if you wanna get these, and I put the checklist in the sleeves. So this is very heavily literacy-based as part of the activity that we're going to do.
See that we have the words using the Cocoa Puff print, and every single picture is embedded in as best practice. And in the checklist, they're using also this, \ checklist to check all the tasks that they complete as we're making the pizzas and as we're making the cupcakes.
So with each of these activities, we have these really cool checklists which the children are going to check with this dry erase marker. Now, this dry erase marker is special because it's short and it's skinny. So being short and skinny means you have the pincer grasp, and we always wanna encourage that pincer grasp, and the dry erase markers are just really, frankly, a lot more fun than broken crayons.
I know a lot of OTs are like, "Break those crayons and get broken crayons," but dry erase markers are so much more fun. So you're gonna see the link for these plastic sleeves that I love to use, and the reason I love using these plastic sleeves is the marker, dry erase marker, comes off super easily. And I also find that these are my favorite dry erase markers.
So then after that, I'll take all of this. So I have my stickers here that I'm gonna use for my fun activity.
I have the signs I'm gonna use. I have them all prepped and ready to go for the week, and I have my checklist, and I have that great- sleeve that I told you that is really, really good, and then I even throw in my mini dry erase markers. I like all my materials together. I throw them in this jumbo Ziploc bag.
Why? If you know, you know. You don't want to lose anything, 'cause nothing's worse than losing one sticker in the activity. It's like missing the final puzzle piece. So I have it in my Ziploc bag. This is it. It's ready to go. So I literally put this in the trunk of my car.
I'm like, "It's Friday. I am ready for next week." This is in my car. On Monday, when I go into work, I'm gonna do my large group, and in my large group, I use these activities. Then I'm gonna use my small group. In the small group, I use these activities. Then I'm gonna go and do therapy. In therapy, I'm gonna use these activities, and I'm gonna be able to take these activities and just change them spot to spot to spot because I have those hard Velcro coins in the back, and I can stick them on the portable felt board, I can stick them on the large group felt board, and I can stick them on the wall in my room where I have a thick piece of soft Velcro, industrial strength, throw them up there, and use them in my therapy room.
My materials are ready. These are two highly engaging best practice activities. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But wait a minute, you're working with children that have different goals. Some of them are working on speech, some of them are working on language, some of them are working on fluency, some of them are working on augmentative communication.
What do you do then? You have two of the same activities, you can't do that." Oh, yes, I can. So what I do here is I have my treatment targets. So I'm showing you the treatment targets from my SIS membership, but I have three levels of the treatment target. So if they're working on language, I have a paragraph.
So basically they're telling a story of how to do the activity, of the movement activity. I also have a complex sentence with three clauses embedded in it, where they're gonna do the three clauses or they can do the two clauses, and at the very basic level, they might just even be reading a sentence to engage in the really fun activity.
So depending on the child I work with, some children are at the sentence level, we might be just saying a sentence before we do the activity. Some are at the complex sentence level, some are at the three clause, and some are at the paragraph, and some are at spontaneously creating a story of how we're gonna do the activity.
Now, of course, these levels are going to change depending on the child. So if the child's highly motivated, highly engaged, we're gonna go for the paragraph 'cause that's gonna give us the best gains. But sometimes attention wanes, sometimes motivation wanes, and I could easily decide to slide back and go into a three clause or even a two clause complex sentence for the language.
What I'm doing is I'm keeping the engagement sustained for a longer period of time back and forth. It's all about the quality of the interaction and increasing the duration of the interaction so that we can increase that sustained focused interaction and attention. This improves executive function, hugely important for academic and social success.
So this is the example with a language. With a child with a speech impairment, I go to my speech treatment target, if you're a CIS member, and I have the complex sentence I could use. I have the simple sentence I could use. I have the paragraph that I could use. So I have three levels right there on hand in my therapy room.
I even put hard Velcro on the back of them so I could have it right on my wall, and I can just pull it off. I see your attention's waning a little bit. We're gonna go to complex sentence. I don't want you to end up under the table running out of the room. We're, 99.9% preventative.
I'm going to read you, and dynamically from a moment to moment bas- basis, I can upshift or I can downshift. So we have a couple of dials we're working with in therapy. We're working with the dial of the task. I can go from sentence, I can go to complex sentence, I can go up to a paragraph, and we're also working with the prompting hierarchy.
I can go with a maximum level of cues, or I can lower it to minimal and no cues, and everything in between. The secret is to be dynamic, and you can only be dynamic if you are 100% present. Now, why am I 100% present? Because I'm not looking behind me for the next activity I'm gonna do. I already have the activities right here in my Ziploc bag.
When I hang it up on the wall, they're ready to go. So I'm prepped and ready. I have two super fun universal design for learning engaging activities that treat the whole child. So these are multifaceted activities that have the literacy baked in, that have the language baked in the form of narratives, that have the executive function, that have the fine motor, that have the gross motor, that have all of that baked into the experience.
We're treating the whole child. So this is high quality, top shelf activities. This is not fast food. I think of it as this is a huge pot, and inside that pot is only the best organic in- ingredients possible with the highest nutrition level within them. So when you think of it that way, you're treating the whole child, and you're giving them the best of the best.
So what we're doing is we're creating two activities every week. Now, when I create these activities, one activity is a little bit more complex than the other. So for instance, the Pete the Cat making the pizzas, you've got eight different pizzas that you're making there.
The activity's a little bit longer. There's a little bit more print in the book. The other one is a little bit more simple. There's a lot of physical movement. You're cracking eggs. You're mixing the bowl. It's a little bit simpler. I always have one that's a little bit more complex, one that's a little more simple, but both of them are super engaging, and both of them get the job done, especially because they're narrative literacy based So we have these activities ready.
Now we're gonna think about all of this is ready, it's in my car, it's ready to go, feeling really good. I have my treatment targets, like I said. These are all ready to go. A lot of my kiddos use augmentative communication, so they're gonna use their augmentative communication device. Maybe they're going to request to play in the activity, maybe they're gonna request to cook in the activity, maybe they're gonna request to read during the activity, whatever, they use to request is whatever they use to request.
So when we're looking at the ingredients, for instance, in the food, we're gonna go ahead and find the eggs, we're gonna go ahead and find the cake, and we're gonna find all of those fun things, or the milk and the ingredients, and we're gonna go find all of them.
They're going to go ahead and use this sentence strip. So they'll look at sentence strip throughout the book. That's another way of fostering the communication development, because many of our kiddos that use augmentative communication develop speech using a sentence strip. So I... a lot of people are like, "Ah, sentence strips, yuck, that's old school.
Well, the research indicates that sentence strips are very, very powerful when it comes to speech development, and we can understand why. Because when you're tapping, you're, you have this entrainment in which the fine motor of the fingers is connected to the motor skills orally of the mouth.
So for instance, if you can think about times when you see children cutting for the first time, they'll move the mouth with the scissors as it opens and close. Or when they're drawing, you're gonna see the tongue move with the fingers as they're drawing. So because of entrainment, this strong connection with the fine motor and the oral motor, when many of the kids are tapping on the words or the syllables as they're spoken, they're making sounds.
So with children with autism, oftentimes it's gonna start with the vowels, 'cause the vowels are easier to produce and they're longer, so the kiddos can hear them, they can perceive them. So if they're saying, "Look at," and for instance, it's pizza, you may hear, "A, a, I, a," because they're hearing the vowels. You can't say what you can't hear.
So a lot of times that's where you're gonna hear the first words, is when you're using the sentence strip. So the look at sentence strip is always very important, and the kids, they don't have to use it, they love using it. They love reading, and I put the sticker on the end of whatever the specific item that they're using within that story-based movement activity and they are developing their vocabulary as well So just a side note on what we're doing with children's augmentative communication.
Now, you're probably thinking about kids in your caseload where you're like, "This isn't gonna interest them. They're interested in puzzles. They're interested in shape sor- sorters. They do nothing but Thomas the Trains. They are not going to agree to do this activity." And that's why I want you to go to episode 227, because I talked about those children.
It's very important that you expand their interests, and this is a great way to do that. In that episode, I show you how you can take sensory, how you can take cause/effect, how you can take highest interest activities and items, and how you can intersperse them, how you can modify these activities to meet them where they are, but at the same time, bridge them into the next level, bridge them into new experiences, and that's what these movement activities do So talking about bridging, let's talk about that school to home or therapy to home connection.
What I have every week, with my SIS membership, is I have a Google Slides deck. Now, the Google Slides decks has activities every week that foster speech development, language development, literacy development. So it's all in there, different types of activities that the parent can choose. Just choose an activity or two they think their child will enjoy that supports the theme that we're doing this week in therapy.
So for instance, I'm showing you last week's materials. It was final consonant deletion. So the activities within there were focused on final consonant deletion, and there were different types of activities. There's narrative activities in there with the story grammar and the elements of the story. You have phonological awareness activities in there.
You have language activities in there. There's a big potpourri of activities in there, so there's something for every child on the caseload. And the parent is asked in the weekly email to pick one or two activities out that they think that their child would enjoy. Now, in addition to that, very importantly, we have those two movement activities or songs that we're basing these movement activities on at the end of the Google Slides deck.
And what I do in that weekly email that I share with the SIS members is I ask parents to review those over the weekend so that the child has prior knowledge of what, and prior experience when we move into these books and these activities for the week. So they're not coming in as a blank slate. The activities are a lot more meaningful because they know the Pete the Cat Pizza Fun Party.
They know the book about Crack, Whisk, Bake Cupcake book. They've reviewed it over the weekend with their parents. They come into therapy, or they come into your large group and eLearning experience or the classroom, and it's so much more meaningful. So there we're creating the home to school bridge. In creating the home to school bridge, another thing that I do is I use the actual sentence strips that we're going to be using in therapy.
I'll tell you what I've learned from my own mistakes in this, is I will share these with parents at home to practice with parent, with their child at home on a daily basis. So I just say, "Just do it one time every day, and do it within the child's routine." So for instance, maybe it'll be, this is what you do every time when you brush your teeth at the end of the day.
And the parents will stick this treatment target to practice it- Up in their bathrooms, so they're brushing their teeth, and then, okay, after we brush our teeth, this is part of our routine, we're going to, it's called habit stack. If you can think about atomic habits. We're gonna go ahead and read that treatment target, that language treatment target, or that speech treatment target, because frequency is so important when it comes to establishing a new behavior.
We don't want them just doing it once a week. We want them to be doing it daily. So we think of what is a routine that you do every single day, and how can we can insert this into their routine, and how can we physically put this treatment target, like stick it up on the wall or stick it up on the side stand so that it's...
Or stick it up on the refrigerator, so it's actually used every single day, and you get that daily practice. Now, in the past, I would give everyone paragraphs, for instance, if it came with speech, and the parents gave me feedback, and they were like, "My child's like, 'No, not the paragraph.' You're not a speech therapist.
This is too hard." So now I look at the individual child, and some children, instead of a paragraph, will get a complex sentence, and some children will even get a sentence. I read the individual child. I think about, okay, what are they likely to do at home? And it's not going to be a lot of work for them to do at home and the parent's not gonna be like, "Oh, no, I've tried this," and the child is like, "Not the paragraph," when they see it.
So I've learned from parents' feedback in the past to individualize it based on the child for what I'm gonna have the parent practice on a daily basis. Another thing I do, because some parents say that they like the flip books, is I'll go ahead and use flip books. So for instance, S-Blends are very powerful.
I do a lot of blend flip books. Now, the blend flip books are the ones that are very powerful. These are the blends that are really going to produce maximal gains. Some parents prefer the flip book, and I give them both.
They have a flip book they can practice, and I'll give that to them, every month I'll give them a flip book. Or they can practice the sentence strips. So they have some options in what works for their family in the home. So that is what I wanted to show you behind the scenes.
This is what I do behind the scenes so that I can be 100% present. And if I'm 100% present, that is when the magic's gonna happen. If I can respond to the child on a moment-to-moment basis in a dynamic manner, if I can look at the child, whether they're doing speech or whether they're doing language, are they at an 80% accuracy point?
Are they at their challenge point? If they're not at an 80% accuracy point, if they're at a 90% accuracy point, it's too easy for them. I need to dial down the cues, or I need to use a more complex target. Or I can look at, all right, let's look at whether it's too hard for them. They're at a 70% accuracy point, so not only are they likely getting frustrated, also we're habituating some errored patterns.
So what do I need to do? I need to up the cueing to get them at that 80% challenge point. Or maybe I need to use an easier treatment target.
And of course, then I have in my mind the dynamic tactal temporal cueing hierarchy that I can go up and down on a moment's basis. So I can easily, throughout the session, I can easily change the task, or I can easily dial up or dial down the amount of prompting I'm getting to always have that child at a challenge point, and to keep that child engaged throughout the therapy session.
So I am hoping that you will do what you do best, which is to roll up your sleeves and make the world a better place, one child at a time. You are always gonna be first.
Yeah. She's Brian shell. She'll get, yeah, she's Brian. She.
